Why the lab leak theory matters

Did Covid-19 somehow escape accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than leaping from bats or pangolins to its human Patient Zero?

On Long Bets, a website where prognosticators test their mettle by playing for real (or at least proceeds-donated-to-charity) stakes, there is an open bet between the British astrophysicist Martin Rees, a noted worrier over apocalyptic possibilities, and Harvard University’s Steven Pinker, famous for his vaulting optimism. For Rees to win, the following prediction must be vindicated: “A bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event within a six-month period starting no later than Dec 31 2020.”

The bet was made for the 2017-20 period; you will notice that its time frame has expired. And yet it remains unsettled, pending a resolution of the question that the Western media has finally decided to take seriously: Did Covid-19 somehow escape accidentally from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than leaping from bats or pangolins to its human Patient Zero?

So if you’re wondering how much the so-called lab leak hypothesis really matters, and what’s actually at stake, there’s one answer: The $400 that Rees bet against Pinker on the self-destructive capacities of the human race.

There are other answers, too, before we get back to what the wager represents. In the last week, as the Biden administration has ramped up its Covid origins investigation, the sharpest commentary on the lab leak theory has taken the form of media criticism from contrarian liberals like Matthew Yglesias and Jonathan Chait. They have tried to explain how a theory that was always circumstantially plausible, given that the outbreak started more than a thousand miles from the bat habitat where similar viruses have been discovered, but just a stone’s throw from an important laboratory studying coronaviruses, was treated as pure conspiracizing by mainstream news outlets and Facebook content-warning providers for so long.

I will leave it to the reader to consider how a similar pressure might manifest itself in other areas, from the 2020-21 murder spike to the recent rise in anti-Semitic violence, where journalists might wish to avoid making concessions to conservative interpretations of reality.

But let me offer a narrower addition to the media critique. One key change to mainstream journalism in the Trump era was the impulse to tell the reader exactly what to think, lest by leaving anything ambiguous you gave an inch to right-wing demagogy. It was not enough to simply report, “Republican politician X said conspiratorial-sounding thing Y.” You also had to specifically describe the conspiratorial thing as false or debunked misinformation, in a way that once would have been considered editorializing, so as to leave no doubt in the vulnerable reader’s mind.

I’m very skeptical that this achieved its intended purpose. (Has anyone drawn to a conspiracy theory been disabused by seeing it described as such in the mainstream media?) But even if it sometimes did, it also created expansive pressures to describe more and more things without any ambiguity and shading, and judge more and more right-wing claims pre-emptively. Which is only a good rule for a truth-seeking profession if you assume the day will never come when Tom Cotton has a point.

Strikingly, though, both Chait and Yglesias argue that this media critique is the most important thing we can take away from the Covid origins debate. “I don’t know if this hypothesis will ever be proven,” Chait writes of the lab leak theory, and “I don’t care,” because “there’s no important policy question riding on the answer.”

This seems mistaken. Yes, if we never figure out the truth of Covid’s origins, the dangers of media groupthink will be the only lesson we can draw for absolutely certain. But if we could find out the truth, and it turned out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology really was the epicenter of a once-in-a-century pandemic, the revelation would itself be a major political and scientific event.

First, to the extent that the United States is engaged in a conflict of propaganda and soft power with the regime in Beijing, there’s a pretty big difference between a world where the Chinese regime can say, We weren’t responsible for Covid but we crushed the virus and the West did not, because we’re strong and they’re decadent, and a world where this was basically their Chernobyl except their incompetence and cover-up sickened not just one of their own cities but also the entire globe.

The latter scenario would also open a debate about how the United States should try to enforce international scientific research safeguards, or how we should operate in a world where they can’t be reasonably enforced. Perhaps that debate would ultimately tilt away from China hawks, as David Frum argues in The Atlantic, because the lesson of a lab leak would be that we actually need “more binding of China to the international order, more cross-border health and safety standards, more American scientists in Chinese labs, and concomitantly, more Chinese scientists in American labs.” Or perhaps instead you would have an attempted scientific and academic embargo, an end to the kind of funding that flowed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology from the U.S.A.I.D., an attempt to manage risk with harder borders, stricter travel restrictions, de-globalization.

Either way, this debate would also affect science policy at home, opening arguments the likes of which we haven’t seen since the era of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island about the risks of scientific hubris and cutting-edge research. This is especially true if there’s any chance that the Covid-19 virus was engineered, in so-called gain of function research, to be more transmissible and lethal — a possibility raised by, among others, a former science writer for this newspaper, Nicholas Wade. But even if it wasn’t, the mere existence of that research, heretofore a subject of obscure intra-scientific controversy, would become a matter of intense public attention and scrutiny.

That scrutiny might not lead to wise decisions, just as the panic over nuclear power arguably led both energy policy and environmentalism astray. To return to the bet with which we started, the regulation of science has to exist in a balance between Martin Rees and Steven Pinker, between healthy pessimism about human blundering and healthy ambition about what human ingenuity can do. If the pandemic blossomed from a reckless blunder, any reckoning could easily go awry, with a crusade for safety pushing us deeper into technological stagnation.

But if we find out that a single laboratory and a few scientists are responsible for one of the greatest human catastrophes in generations, it’s no use to wish the reckoning away.

* Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The NY Times since 2009