What was the big emergency in Wuhan all about?
ProPublica and Vanity Fair published a blockbuster story yesterday suggesting that COVID-19 originated with a lab leak in Wuhan, not from natural causes. I've read it, and I feel like I must be missing something.
The story is 10,000 words long, but almost all of that is a rehash of past arguments. The only thing new is a review of some documents by Toy Reid, an expert in Chinese bureaucratese who spent nine months working with the Republican staff in the Senate on a report about the origins of COVID. Reid says that if you interpret the pishi correctly, it turns out there was some kind of big emergency at the Wuhan lab toward the end of 2019—and the ProPublica/Vanity Fair team says it confirmed this with other China experts.
And that's about that. It's a new wrinkle, but there's not very much there. It's a bit of a Jenga tower of supposition based on marginalia, and even if it's all true there's no evidence the emergency had anything to do with a leak, or with COVID, or with bats, or with anything else specific. At the end, we're left at about the same place we started.
The strongest reason to believe the lab leak theory has always been simple and entirely speculative: It's a hell of a coincidence that COVID-19 originated precisely at the site of a major biolab facility that was widely known to be a little loosely managed. Aside from that, there's long been knowledge of a sick researcher, Chinese unwillingness to cooperate in an investigation, and a few other things that are suspicious if you have a suspicious mind.
Conversely, the case for a normal zoonotic origin of COVID has always been based on solid evidence that's only gotten stronger as more research is done. It remains the overwhelming consensus of virology experts who have looked into it.
There's not much more to say about this. Virologists are virtually unanimous in thinking that COVID-19 originated naturally. Non-virologists span the gamut, including a subset of conservatives who are seemingly desperate to find evidence of Chinese deceit lurking behind the scenes. There's a chance they're right, but their evidence remains thin, cherry picked, and always vaguely conspiratorial. Draw your own conclusions.
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