Was COVID-19 Created in a Laboratory?
The lab leak theory is possible, but that doesn’t make it likely
One of the Big Questions about SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, has for a while been about its origins. Most viruses that cause disease in humans have long, fascinating origin stories, with jumps from animal to animal until they finally make it into people and start killing people. But Covid-19, goes the theory, must be lab-grown — either from an intentional lab leak or a mistake of epic proportions — there’s simply too much circumstantial evidence to ignore!
This idea doesn’t really make sense. There’s no special reason to believe that Covid-19 must have been grown in a lab. Sure, there’s political reasons that we might think the Chinese government are untrustworthy, but that’s a slim basis for a theory. As humans, when we are given two possibilities, we assume that they are somewhat equivalent in likelihood, so when you hear “lab leak or natural origin” it’s not unreasonable to assume that those two things are about as likely as one another, even though that makes no sense whatsoever.
