You might think that, over the past year or two, public debate about the origins of the pandemic has loosened up. The lab-leak hypothesis has been aired repeatedly in Congress and endorsed with varying degrees of confidence by some intelligence agencies.
Even so, pandemic tribalism over whether the virus emerged from a laboratory or in a natural spillover at a market or elsewhere has proved remarkably resilient. Any shred of new evidence, no matter how flimsy, is hailed as near-definitive proof by one side or the other.
How did this happen, and why does it continue to? The answers are perhaps not novel, but they are worth dwelling on. As [computational biologist Jesse] Bloom says, a muddled and uncertain story isn’t an especially exciting one, for scientists or for journalists. To many, it can feel that the very value of science hangs in the balance of the pandemic-origins debate, turning it into an increasingly important front in the new culture war.
Because the material is so deeply technical, laypeople also impose their own narrative maps on it. In processing such material, journalists often defer to the analysis of their sources. Across a pandemic in which the public was desperate for new information, we have probably gotten too used to treating hurriedly prepared reports as definitive science.