Was COVID-19 Created in a Laboratory?

The lab leak theory is possible, but that doesn’t make it likely

I was going to Photoshop a pair of lab glasses on this picture of SARS-CoV-2, but then I remembered that my graphical skills are roughly on par with my juggling (it’s been a decade and I still can’t regularly keep 3 balls in the air) and decided not to. Source: CDC

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.

Tomorrow morning I will either wake up a human or metamorphose in a horrific fashion into a part-human part-insect hybrid. In all honesty, I’m hoping for the latter — I’d be rebuffed by society but I could fight crime as the infamous Fly Man. Source: Pexels

We know from decades of evidence that new diseases jump from animals to humans all the time. There are literally dozens of cases in the last few decades alone where an entirely new disease has transferred from a non-human host to people. This has even happened twice in recent memory with coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-2, which gives you some idea of just how unsurprising it is when a novel pathogen of likely animal origin is identified. All of this is why scientists say that the “default assumption” is that the virus emerged naturally — it happens literally all the time.

And yet, headlines are currently screaming that scientists have “proved” that Covid-19 was bioengineered in a lab despite this being no more likely than in July 2020. What’s going on?

The Science

The paper that all the headlines are based on appears to be a perspective piece written by three authors that will soon appear in the journal Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery. This is a new…