This all raises a final question: How could this group of elite scientists have gotten this paramount question so horribly wrong?
The inevitable answer is: They didn’t. They weren’t wrong. They were lying.
Four years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Chinese city of Wuhan, what do we know about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus?
We were presented at the outset with two competing theories: natural-origin spillover from animals to humans and accidental lab leak. And at the outset, a cadre of elite scientists passionately argued that the evidence overwhelmingly favored a natural origin. With comparable fervor, they dismissed the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab as a “conspiracy theory.”
With a few notable exceptions, mainstream media outlets and the larger scientific community vehemently nodded in agreement. NPR said the lab-leak theory was “debunked”; Vanity Fair called it a “right-wing coronavirus conspiracy”; and Facebook banned posts suggesting the virus may have been manufactured in a lab.
Four years later, that narrative has begun to crack—and rightly so.
It was always a lie—one of the most consequential lies of the 21st century. Like all great lies, it perfectly inverted the truth: The evidence supporting natural spillover has always been thin. Conversely, the evidence pointing to a lab leak has always been compelling and has grown substantially more persuasive with time.
Delusions of Adequacy 