From the beginning, the genomic evidence led most virologists who were investigating SARS-CoV-2 to favor a zoonotic origin involving a jump of the virus from bats to humans, possibly with the help of an intermediate host animal.
But considering the anxiety-provoking upheavals of the pandemic, it came as no surprise that the virus inspired conspiratorial thinking.
The so-called lab-leak hypothesis gained sufficient rhetorical and political force that President Joe Biden instructed the U.S. intelligence services to investigate it. Although the interagency intelligence report update, declassified in October 2021, dismissed several popular laboratory-origin claims—including that the virus was a bioweapon and that the Chinese government knew about the virus before the pandemic—it was unable to unequivocally resolve the origin question.
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The anti-GMO organization U.S. Right to Know honed its [Freedom of Information Act, or] FOIA tactics against food scientists before turning its sights on virologists. Despite e-mails clearly showing virologists considering but ultimately rejecting various claims about SARS-CoV-2 being engineered, lab-leak proponents tend to selectively quote messages. They cast virologists as either never having given lab scenarios fair consideration or—on the other extreme—believing in a lab origin all along and deliberately lying about it. People who push conspiracy theories often toggle between opposing claims as the rhetorical need arises.
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We must anticipate that this type of dangerous distraction will continue. Scientists identified with COVID research are suffering abuse, including death threats. When the Omicron variant emerged, so did nonsensical conspiracy theories that it, too, was an escaped, human-altered virus, originating from the lab in South Africa that first reported it. One can only assume that further variants may likewise be blamed on whichever research lab is closest to the location of discovery. We are not doomed to keep repeating the mistakes of past intersections of science and conspiracy should we choose to learn from them instead.
