Five years after the onset of the Covid pandemic, it’s tempting to think of [the debate between lab leak versus natural transmssion] as ancient history. We learned our lesson about lab safety — and about the need to be straight with the public — and now we can move on to new crises, like measles and the evolving bird flu, right?
Wrong. If anyone needs convincing that the next pandemic is only an accident away, check out a recent paper in Cell, a prestigious scientific journal. Researchers, many of whom work or have worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (yes, the same institution), describe taking samples of viruses found in bats (yes, the same animal) and experimenting to see if they could infect human cells and pose a pandemic risk.
We may not know exactly how the Covid pandemic started, but if research activities were involved, that would mean two out of the last four or five pandemics were caused by our own scientific mishaps. Let’s not make a third.
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