The shifting fortunes of the Covid lab-leak hypothesis tell a fascinating story about the sociology of expertise. As Megan K. Stack recently reminded readers in her New York Times column, in the first year of the pandemic the notion that the virus might have emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology rather than from the nearby Wuhan seafood market was treated as credulous at best and sinister at worst. In the emergency atmosphere of the period, drastic measures curtailing the circulation of the theory seemed appropriate to many. Stack’s trip down memory lane is bracing:
With Mr. Trump sneering about “kung flu” and “China virus,” it was easy to write off a lab-leak hypothesis as a right-wing fantasy. The MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace called it “one of Trumpworld’s most favorite conspiracy theories.” Twitter added warning labels to posts that argued for lab leak; Facebook banned such posts altogether for several months in 2021 before reversing the decision. NPR called it a “baseless conspiracy theory” in a tweet, and the foreign affairs expert Fareed Zakaria wrote (and repeated on CNN): “The far right has now found its own virus conspiracy theory.”
To observers like Stack, the credulity appears in retrospect to have been the media’s. Although we’ll probably never know the virus’s origin for certain, reporting over the last couple of years suggests that scientists had never been in agreement about the implausibility of a lab-leak; the appearance that they were may have been an artifact of the convergence of media biases with the interests of a vocal faction of scientists.
Reporters are not virologists; their capacity to adjudicate expert claims is limited. This doesn’t get them off the hook, of course, but in the crisis of 2020 and 2021 it helps explain their ready assent to the authoritative pronouncements of Anthony Fauci, who, in Stack’s view, went out of his way to articulate an expert consensus where none in fact existed. “He knew there was real debate,” Stack writes; “he was in the thick of it.” Stack is thinking, for instance, of Fauci’s recent statement that “half the people” on a February 2020 conference call among 11 scientific experts across the world “felt it might be from a lab” — a division of expert opinion one would have been hard-pressed to infer from either Fauci’s public pronouncements or media coverage at the time.
To the extent that any one person can take credit for shattering the taboo on coverage of a possible lab leak, it’s the novelist and journalist Nicholson Baker, whose 2021 New York magazine essay, “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis,” surfaced a host of highly credentialed experts whose intuitions about the origin of the virus differed from Fauci’s. (New York has appended a justifiably proud prefatory note to Baker’s essay: “Nearly everything that would later serve as the basis for this public reconsideration of pandemic origins was contained in Baker’s original story, the first of its kind to break the ice.”)
Many of the experts Baker talked to think it’s quite possible that “‘gain of function’ experiments — aimed to create new, more virulent, or more infectious strains of diseases in an effort to predict and therefore defend against threats that might conceivably arise in nature” are responsible for Covid, and some of them have been warning about the possibility of an event like this for a long time. In 2012, for instance, Lynn Klotz and Edward J. Sylvester wrote a paper for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists called “The unacceptable risks of a man-made pandemic.” The Rutgers virologist Richard Ebright, one of the most vocal proponents of the lab-leak theory, criticized gain-of-function research back in 2015 in stark terms: “The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk.”
As these ideas get a hearing, some of the most dramatic passages of pandemic-related political drama will take on new coloring. In 2021, Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci squared off over whether the Wuhan laboratory was involved in NIH-funded gain-of-function research. Paul describes what he says is gain-of-function research and quotes Ebright as an authoritative source. Then he goes in for what he hopes is the kill; Fauci dismisses him as an ignoramus:
Paul: Dr. Fauci, knowing that it is a crime to lie to Congress, do you wish to retract your statement of May 11 where you claimed that the NIH never funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan?
Fauci: Senator Paul, I have never lied before the Congress, and I do not retract that statement. This paper that you are referring to was judged by qualified staff up and down the chain as not being gain-of-function.
Paul: You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans, you’re saying that’s not gain-of-function?
Fauci: That is correct. And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about.
Whether the research Paul described as gain-of-function was in fact gain-of-function turns out to be a fine and difficult question — some experts say that it was, some that it wasn’t — but it may also be an irrelevant one. As Josh Rogin wrote in The Washington Post shortly after the hearings: “It doesn’t matter which ‘gain of function’ definition you prefer. What everyone can now see clearly is that NIH was collaborating on risky research with a Chinese lab that has zero transparency and zero accountability during a crisis — and no one in a position of power addressed that risk.” In this context, Fauci’s assertive performance of expertise — so welcome when memories of Trump’s idiotic speculations about the miraculous curative powers of bleach or ultraviolet light were fresh — begins to look a bit hollow.
Xenophobic hostility to China surely motivated some of the interest in the possible laboratory origins of the virus, but Baker emphasized to me that, in his view, the real culprit is the U.S. “This is not about Chinese scientists versus the world — it’s about an American-funded research pipeline.” And he rejects the demonization of Fauci by some on the right. Fauci’s aim, Baker says “was to cure, not to sicken.” To Baker, Fauci is guilty not of malevolence but of the scientist’s cardinal sin — hubris. “He wanted to find new ways to eradicate diseases and counter terrorist biothreats. He wanted to use coronaviruses to create fancy new highly flexible vaccine platforms. With these goals in mind, he built way too many high-containment laboratories and funded way too much dangerous — really appallingly dangerous — research.”
We might never know whether Covid had a zoonotic or laboratory origin. Just the other week, a study offered some new support for the former scenario. But the fact that the latter is sufficiently plausible to have attracted serious attention from scientists from the very beginning of the pandemic raises fundamental questions about the public’s right to know what’s going on in laboratories — and to make rules about it. As Stanford Medical School’s David Relman told Baker, “It is unethical to place so many members of the public at risk and then consult only scientists — or, even worse, just a small subset of scientists — and exclude others from the decision-making and oversight process.” David Wallace-Wells made a similar point in The New York Times in February. “Do we need to know what started Covid,” he asks, "... to agree that there are real risks of some cutting-edge virological research and that ... decisions about that research should reckon with those risks?” From this point of view, democratic oversight is the antidote to the hubris of the experts.
Read Megan K. Stack’s “Dr. Fauci Could Have Said A Lot More” and David Wallace Wells’s “We’ve Been Talking About the Lab-Leak Hypothesis All Wrong” in The New York Times, and Nicholson Baker’s “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis” in New York magazine.
