NEWSLETTER
The “Lab Leak” Hypothesis Returns
Cell Crunch (Issue 2021.01.08)
This is a free newsletter, sent twice weekly. Sign up here.
The Lab Leak Idea Returns
The biggest story this week was the New York magazine cover story, touting the theory that the coronavirus was made in, and leaked from, a Wuhan laboratory (Link to story). It was followed, a few days later, by a Forbes report stating that China had denied entry for an international team aiming to study the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
The New York article focuses largely on gain-of-function studies, and how they might be associated with the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. The article is labeled as investigative journalism but, in my opinion, should not qualify as such. Much of its details were previously known and covered by the Washington Post and others. Multiple sources quoted in the article state that there’s no evidence one way or the other (lab leak vs. ‘natural’) but, nonetheless, the author makes his biases clearly known. The article begins with: “What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe,” and is replete with unnecessary statements, including this statement, about gain-of-function experiments:
“But in the end, Baric was allowed to proceed with his experiments, and the research…
