Covid Lab-Leak and the Attack on Common Sense

Most of us learned about the virus we now call SARS-CoV-2 just over three years ago, on January 6, 2020. Reports of a fast-spreading respiratory infection that was hospitalizing and killing people in the southern Chinese city of Wuhan quickly became the dominant news story, and by January 20 the first domestic case was registered in Washington State. We were told, first, that coronaviruses of this kind were known to spread among bat populations in China, and that the virus likely leapt from bat to human at a live-animal market in Wuhan. The pangolin was the likely culprit. (Three years later, it’s the raccoon-dog.) But all the while, lurking in plain sight, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biosafety-level 4 lab with funding from the United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) that openly engages in coronavirus research. It felt only natural to ask: Could this virus have originated in a lab?