The lab-leak hypothesis: an agonizing media dilemma about managing the narrative vs. empowering the mob

What does it mean that both left-leaning and mainstream media are pushing back against the sudden political and scientific respect for the “lab leak” hypothesis of COVID’s origin? Recent science writing, official statements, and leaked information have created a new space in public discussion that treats the “lab leak” hypothesis as plausible and not yet disproven. In reaction, there is a gathering parade (of which three examples follow) of articles that note this quickening beat but hasten to dismiss the hypothesis. But they do so fallaciously, in many cases — fashioning tendentious arguments, mischaracterizing elements of the hypothesis, and worst of all, quoting scientific sources uncritically without weighing the interests and potential biases of institutions that claim scientific objectivity. This effort may be well-intentioned, insofar as mainstream media may not wish to encourage anti-science factions, with which the media actively associated earlier speculation on a lab-leak origin of COVID. Is it harmful though?

There are clearly many ramifications if this hypothesis provers true, or even if it merely gains credence. This article focuses on ramifications of the media’s behavior in the renewed debate. Now that the lab-leak hypothesis is going mainstream and gathering scientific acknowledgement, media seem to be choosing to double down on their earlier, credulous embrace of science-establishment denials. We need to consider whether this is a problem, and what to do about it.

Spoiler: I won’t present or take a position on all the detailed arguments on each side of this issue, for lack of space and expertise, except as necessary to comment on the media characterizations of the debate. While this article focuses on the media, it makes necessary detours into the fallibility of scientific institutions, the parroting of which is the media’s main failing in this debate. (For lack of space, neither will this article deconstruct ‘media.’ Let’s just say for these purposes it refers to well-resourced institutional purveyors of news, analysis and opinion-leading.) I have read on the subject opportunistically not exhaustively, and I am a social scientist not a virologist or geneticist. I will state up front that I find some elements of the lab-leak hypothesis to be salient and convincing, if short of probative; in British legal terms, ‘there is a case to answer.’ And some refutations thereof are erroneous and in a few cases outright fraudulent. But whichever hypothesis turns out to be true, we need to understand the media’s treatment of the debate, because they are doing us, global health, science, and democracy a major disservice if they choose to manage the narrative rather than exemplify judiciousness. (Especially as many scientific institutions have been injudicious on this issue, which the media is amplifying not correcting.)

To set the stage, the lab-leak hypothesis has two parts: first, that SARS-CoV-2 (the proper name for the COVID virus) is the product of genetic engineering, specifically modifications of a wild coronavirus presumably for gain-of-function research, rather than fully being a naturally evolved virus. Second, that this product infected lab workers or otherwise escaped from the lab. (A variant of the hypothesis excludes the engineering and hypothesizes that SARS-CoV-2 was present naturally in bats captured in a coronavirus-endemic region and held at a lab, and thereby infected workers.) This therefore is not a conspiracy theory, but an accident one, or perhaps an accident-plus-hubris hypothesis.

Here is a selection of the technical and circumstantial arguments for the hypothesis:

· Coincidence of time and place: the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), in the city where the COVID pandemic seems to have started, is a major center of coronavirus research and genetic engineering. (The populations of bats that host SARS-CoV-2’s closest wild relatives found to date live about a thousand miles to the south.) Published scientific papers show that it has been conducting gain-of-function research on wild coronaviruses since at least 2015, specifically to try to increase their infectivity in humans, in order to determine what to monitor closely in wild-virus evolution and to get a head start on vaccine counter-measures.

· The Institute used biosafety level (BSL) 2, the second-lowest of four levels, for its coronavirus gain-of-function research, making a lab escape perfectly plausible: BSL2 is insufficient for a highly transmissible airborne pathogen like SARS-CoV-2. (One biosafety expert characterized it as the level typical of US dentists’ offices.[i])

· The SARS-CoV-2 genome features a sequence of four amino acids whose resulting protein creates a “furin-cleavage site,” which gives the virus its signature potency in invading human cells. Although many unrelated human-infecting viruses have furin-cleavage sites composed of various amino-acid sequences (it seems there is more than one way to cleave a furin), no coronavirus relative of SARS-CoV-2 features this sequence or indeed any furin-cleaving sequence, meaning that SARS-CoV-2 could not have obtained it by viral recombination with a relative. It is possible but improbable that SARS-CoV-2 acquired this indispensable quartet through random, natural mutation.

· Urgent and extensive searching for one or more evolutionary intermediaries between SARS-CoV-2 and its known wild coronavirus cousins — intermediaries that feature partial mutations towards SARS-CoV-2’s distinctive infectious capability — has found nothing. Nor has it found an intermediate host species, in which the virus might be expected to have evolved somewhat, setting the stage for invading humans. By contrast, such searching for a SARS intermediary host in 2002 found it — the civet — within four months of the SARS outbreak.

It bears remembering that SARS-CoV-2 is not a particularly lethal virus: its case fatality rate is about ten times greater than seasonal flu but far below those of its coronavirus cousins SARS and MERS, and a fraction of Ebola’s. However it is highly transmissible, more so than the common cold, seasonal flu, Ebola and MERS. One implication of this is that it undermines speculation that SARS-CoV-2’s capabilities were engineered with a bioweapon in mind, rather than well-intentioned research to discover how close a wild virus might be to mutating into human-infectious form. Although COVID has done plenty of damage, it would be considered lame as a bioweapon in that it doesn’t even match the lethality of its wild cousins.

Swerving abruptly to politics, most readers will know that President Trump, members of his Administration, and many supporters voiced various forms of the lab-leak hypothesis in the early days as an accusation against China (and by implication a self-exculpation). Centrist and left-leaning media bundled this with the demonstrable falsehoods that the same parties uttered, like downplaying the severity of the disease and the pandemic, and contesting the effectiveness of masks. So even though the coincidence of time and place — Wuhan city and WIV — was obvious from the start, those desperate to get Trump out of power evidently felt it would endanger that objective to explore the facts and hypotheses judiciously. Recent findings have given them further motivation for tendentiousness, in that their hero Dr. Anthony Fauci seems to have been involved, albeit indirectly, in funding WIV’s gain-of-function coronavirus research which is the prime suspect in the lab-leak hypothesis. Faced with a choice of burying this revelation or admitting that they had previously failed to disclose such interests on the part of people claiming scientific objectivity (most notoriously Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, through which WIV’s funding from the US Government passed), they seem to still hope to bury it.

With that in mind, let’s look at some typical recent articles on the subject, to see if and where they go wrong:

Exhibit A: Amanda Marcotte on Salon, 16 June 2021: “As science educator Rebecca Watson explained in a video [14] responding to the controversy last week, ‘There is currently no evidence that COVID-19 originated in a lab. None.’” The article does not disguise its anti-Trump purpose, so the author can’t be accused of a hidden agenda. The fault is in quoting a self-styled science educator as if that settles the matter. The writer should know that many scientists are not only prone to error or wrong conclusions, but also self-censoring for the sake of conformity, or pursuing agendas.

Exhibit B: Lindsay Beyerstein on Alternet, 10 June 2021. “There is no evidence that COVID was released from a lab. There is a mountain of evidence that animals infect humans with novel viruses all the time; that bats are a natural reservoir of numerous coronaviruses in the SARS family; that bats are constantly recombining them in their bodies; and that the wildlife trade is a vector for spreading them from bats to humans, often through an intermediate species.” This writer does not quote experts, but presumably paraphrases them in presenting her arguments. They are written with a confident cadence. But they both mis-state facts and elide fine points of supporting facts. As outlined above, there is actually quite a bit of evidence. And some evidence that one should expect to find in support of a natural zoonotic transmission — the evolutionary or intermediary-host trail — is still lacking.

Exhibit C: Justin Ling writing in Foreign Policy, 15 June 2021. As one example from this rich array of slights-of-hand, we see what you might call refutation by mischaracterization: the writer mischaracterizes an opposing argument, or selects a weak variant thereof, so as to easily rebut it. In this case, it involves the amino-acid quartet that gives SARS-CoV-2 its furin-cleavage capacity. Ling writes: “One of the paper’s authors told the Mail that four positively charged amino acids in the virus’s genetic makeup were the key evidence: `The laws of physics mean that you cannot have four positively charged amino acids in a row. The only way you can get this is if you artificially manufacture it,’ the author told the British paper…Scientists wasted no time shredding the idea. One, calling it `unbelievable bullshit,’ pointed out that a third of the proteins in the human body carry that characteristic. As another noted, `even man-made things must obey the laws of physics.’” That sounds like quite a smackdown. But it mis-characterizes the argument about the amino acids. The suspicious point is not their positivity or negativity, but rather that their sequence has no evolutionary antecedent in wild coronaviruses, so far as can be found to date, and therefore implantation becomes a likelier explanation. By selecting a weak variant of the amino-acid argument, the writer pretends to shoot down the whole breadth of the argument; it pretends to address the issue without doing so.

There is also uncritical quotation: Ling quotes researchers who say this particular amino-acid sequence forms only a suboptimal furin-cleavage site, and thus is unlikely to be the product of design. But Ling does not ask the obvious follow-up question: if it’s so sub-optimal, how then does COVID manage to be so transmissive? One shudders to think what kind of pandemic an optimal furin-cleavage site would have caused. One can also imagine that prudent gain-of-function researchers would avoid creating an optimally infective (thus highly dangerous) capacity, but instead a borderline one that suffices for their purposes. Ling also reports with no apparent surprise that “Peter Ben Embarek is a World Health Organization food security expert, tapped by the internationalist organization to fly to Wuhan and investigate the origins of the virus.” In fact, Embarek is a food-safety and animal-disease scientist, disciplines relevant to studying a virus’ origins, whereas the food-security discipline consists mainly of agricultural science and micro-economics. Ling both gets it wrong and fails to comment on the strangeness of the WHO sending, per Ling’s description, a crop scientist cum micro-economist to study a politicized matter of virology. (If Ling had got it right, he should have pointed out that WHO assigning the leadership of this mission to a food-safety and animal-disease expert betrays a pre-supposition about COVID’s origin.)

Honorable mention to the Washington Post on 4 June 2021 for sophistry such as this: “Among early [COVID] cases [in Wuhan], 55 percent had had exposure to wildlife markets…” But that is clearly meaningless without stating what proportion of the overall Wuhan population had exposure to such markets. That proportion could easily approach 55%, which would indicate no correlation between early COVID cases and exposure to wildlife markets.

So these are three imperfect articles. We can presume there are many more, and we may suppose that it’s not the fault of the individual writers but more of the media institutions that control them and their writing. Why then is a major part of the media pushing the narrative in this direction, failing to improve upon the sometimes fallacious, tendentious, and/or self-serving output of their sources in the scientific institutions? They probably feel a need to shun and counter credulous, anti-scientific, politically-motivated pseudo-journalism, which has developed an adeptness at fake news, especially that based on a grain of truth. (One is tempted to think that even if there were no evidence or indication of the lab-leak scenario, such political actors and aligned media would have invented it.) But the mainstream risks paradoxically empowering such actors if it conspicuously denies the obvious to the extent that it leaves space for a marginal, insincere figure like Trump to gain credibility by shouting things that the mainstream is unwilling to say — as he did in shouting that the US has to get out of forever wars, has to get out of bad trade deals, and doesn’t need a new Cold War. Also, I like as much as anyone to laugh at QAnon and its addled followers, but I also bear in mind that the Jeffrey Epstein revelations show that the rich and powerful had access to a pervasive pedophilia scheme — which parallels the essentials of QAnon. That does not mean that QAnon is true; it means that it is a version, albeit twisted, of the truth, coincidentally or not, and therefore its followers are injudicious and credulous rather than delusional. Mainstream media fail to note the degree of congruity between the Epstein facts and the QAnon fantasy.

Credulity goes both ways: respect for science doesn’t equate with quoting scientific sources uncritically. Media has failed to apply normal journalistic skepticism and judiciousness to scientific institutions’ claims. Many scientific refutations of lab leak, in early 2020 and now, have been specious and deceptive, and moreover from highly interested parties who fail to reveal their partiality. If publicizing these failings erodes faith in scientific institutions, then one can only say that erosion is well deserved. What is the point in preserving respect for scientific authorities if they lead us astray as often as not? After all, the World Health Organization — many of whose excellent staff I know personally and professionally — nonetheless made a series of pivotal blunders on COVID: delaying acknowledgement of its airborne capacity, downplaying the importance of masks, underestimating the effectiveness of travel restrictions. Such institutions should not be abandoned, but we need to keep them honest, and realize that they are just as capable of perversion of science as fake-newsery is.

But is there a “do no harm” consideration in the issue of correcting media shortcomings in this COVID-origins story? The media have gotten themselves into a position where remedying their scientific injudiciousness may, paradoxically, empower the anti-science factions, because the media would be turning on the scientific institutions that they have till now held up as counterweights to mob thinking. This has importance beyond COVID in that you could argue that deference to science is the only hope of fostering popular and/or elite support for the radical measures needed to reverse climate breakdown, which is a threat far more profound than even the pandemic. If true, it would be worth swallowing scientific institutions’ acts of deception on COVID origins. The counter-argument is that such support on climate measures is far too slow in coming anyway, so the game has to be shaken up somehow. Furthermore, even though scientific institutions have been more or less unanimous on climate breakdown’s reality and ramifications, and mainstream media has conveyed those messages, there is a strong possibility that the centrist scientific forecasts on climate breakdown are far too conservative and sanguine, and the near-term reality will be catastrophically and irreversibly worse. So countenancing the perversion of objective scientific analysis on COVID in the hopes of fostering public acceptance of mainstream scientific predictions on climate may be misguided.

This is not the first time that scientific establishments have countered an inconvenient virus-origin story with fallacious rebuttals. In 1999 Edward Hooper published a tome (The River) on the origins of HIV: building on an earlier investigative piece that Rolling Stone published in 1992, Hooper argued that massive circumstantial evidence — coincidence of time and place, especially in unprecedented human-chimpanzee commingling — made it plausible that HIV had jumped to humans on a large scale for the first time by means of novel polio-vaccine programs in the Congo in the 1950s. Hooper posited that HIV’s simian antecedent contaminated some lots of the oral vaccine, as the vaccine’s development had entailed large-scale experimentation on chimpanzees, mostly done at a large primate center near the Congolese city of Kisangani. Although this live, attenuated-virus vaccine was cultivated in the cadaver tissues of more common and cheaper-to-acquire primates, such as rhesus monkeys, researchers at the center may also have taken advantage of chimpanzee tissues from the center’s colony of 500 or so chimps. (One variant theory, noting that this huge chimp colony occasioned what must have been one of the largest sustained human-chimpanzee interactions ever, posits that this could have occasioned one or more transmissions more along the lines of the standard ‘monkey-hunter’ scenario — cuts, bites, accidents with sharp instruments.) Hooper’s hypothesis appalled scientific institutions, both because of its incrimination, and for fear of the effects that a spreading belief in the idea would have on vaccination programs, which were already encountering resistance and suspicion, often religiously-based, in certain places. WHO, for one, offered a categorical rebuttal that HIV could not be transmitted orally. But this was knowingly false. It is true that HIV does not survive digestive fluids and passage through the gut tract. However, it can penetrate the bloodstream through lesions. If a child has oral lesions — a common enough condition even in places where people don’t brush their teeth with sticks — then swirling an HIV-infected fluid around the mouth could allow HIV to penetrate. It’s not a particularly likely outcome for any given child who swallows a few drops of infected fluid, even with an oral lesion. But multiplied by hundreds of thousands of children in one of the first mass polio vaccination campaigns, some such infections become more likely.

This HIV hypothesis remains neither proven nor disproven. It seems to become less likely as time goes on and more genetic information on the various HIVs and their simian-virus relatives is examined without finding confirmation. But the striking lesson from this episode is that the World Health Organization was willing to put out a false scientific statement to rebut the charge. (Other institutions and individuals contributed specious rebuttals as well, intermingled with valid ones.)

The COVID debate illuminates at least two common fallacies that rebuttals to controversial theories tend to employ. First is the “highly unlikely” fallacy. A dissenting explanation for an observed phenomenon is typically dismissed as unlikely, as if that ends the debate. That’s fallacious because an unlikely event needs an unlikely explanation: any cause of an unlikely event is, by definition, unlikely, otherwise the resulting event wouldn’t be unlikely. An everyday bumper-thumper car accident needs no farfetched explanation. A single-car accident in good driving conditions does. A virus native to chimpanzees in a remote and impenetrable rain forest jumping species to cause a human pandemic first identified in San Francisco can only have an unlikely explanation. A global coronavirus pandemic is perhaps a less improbable event — after all, colds and flus are coronaviruses, and new ones go around the world every year, usually from domestic-animal hosts like ducks or pigs. But one emerging from some remote Chinese bat cave in perfect form for human transmission is less likely.

The second is the “no evidence” fallacy, in which a statement that purports to centralize evidence is actually obfuscatory if it omits to describe what evidence has been sought. Suppose I say “There is no evidence that there’s a black cat in my backyard right now.” The sensible response would be “Have you looked in your backyard recently?” It is too often meant to falsely imply “a thorough search for evidence has turned up none.” Those who respect institutions probably assume that they would not state there is no evidence without having searched diligently for it. That turns out to be untrue. (A variant, much loved by pseudo-investigative commissions, is to present evidence in stultifying detail, and then summarize that “there is no evidence,” trusting that most people will read only the summaries.)

There is in fact plenty of evidence for gain-of-function plus lab leak. Natural origin including species jump is, for no particularly good reason, the default hypothesis, but in this case the trail of evidence one would expect — a series of evolutionary stages that culminates in the virus that is pathogenic and highly transmissible among humans — has not been found despite intensive searching. Recall that in SARS-CoV-2’s furin cleavage site, all four of its component amino acids are different from those in the comparable site on SARS-CoV-2’s nearest wild relative found to date. You might expect one amino-acid molecule to change, over a long enough period, in the course of normal mutation. But for all four to mutate, apparently abruptly, and exactly to the combination needed to create a human-infection furin-cleavage capacity, is highly against the odds. On the other hand virologists and lab engineers can do such things, and in fact do. So which is really more likely? If you’re sitting in a pitch-black concert hall and you hear the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth played on the piano onstage, you might suppose that a chimpanzee sitting on the piano bench had tapped it out at random. Or you might suppose that a pianist had played it on purpose. Scientific objectivity requires considering both scenarios until one is proven; but you would never presuppose that the random explanation — the chimp — is more likely.[ii]

The lab-leak hypothesis is derided as a conspiracy theory. In fact it’s not — it’s an accident-plus-hubris theory. But even if it were, the public should be aware that there is a long history of authorities concertedly impugning the term ‘conspiracy theory’ in order to control the narrative — at least as far back as the CIA’s 1967 memo to cooperative journalists outlining how to characterize dissent from the Warren Report as delusional. Even earlier, around 1952, the US Government embarked on a secret campaign to derogate believers in UFOs as unhinged. These in essence were conspiracies to impugn conspiracy-theorizing. Conspiracy to commit a crime is a felony in all 50 states plus in Federal law, and conspiracy prosecutions happen every week. Would they bother, if conspiracies never really happen? Consider, too, that the official version of 9/11 is itself a conspiracy theory, that Al-Qaeda members conspired to commit the attacks. It starts to look like the real functional definition of a conspiracy theory is that it posits that someone in authority did something wrong. Dismissing all such suppositions because of their mere nature is saying that no one in authority ever does anything wrong, not even carelessness.

For all that, the media now have a genuine dilemma, over which even those inclined to single-minded pursuit of the truth will agonize. I’m not assuming the lab-leak hypothesis is true or will survive further scrutiny; the dilemma is about how the media conducting a fair debate might possibly, paradoxically, cause harm. The political ramifications of conceding the credibility of, and perhaps even eventually showing as likely, the lab-leak hypothesis are easy to envision in the short term: impairment of the vaccination solution to the pandemic and related measures, less trust in science and institutions, spill-over into other major public issues that hinge on correct science. Bad as the pandemic is, the latter is the most important, if belief in lab leak fuels those who oppose climate-change measures. Nothing is worth that. There is a glaring deficit of judiciousness in the media and among political partisans on most issues, which harms us every day. But realistically, no one will manage to use this COVID-origin issue to leverage scientific judiciousness among the general public or the media, if only because the genetics are too abstruse. (I have a Ph.D., yet I could barely follow the technical articles.)

The way to counter politically-motivated pseudo-science is not by trying to turn the same weapon against its users. I think this is what the mainstream media have been doing, wittingly or not, well-intentioned or not. On many issues, science supports the corporate-centrist view that mainstream media exists to propagate. (In other, arguably more important ways, it does not.) So media are used to quoting scientific sources, even interested ones, to support their narrative. Here, in the new discussion about the origin of COVID-19, is an unexpected case where honest science seems to be going the other way, and mainstream scientific sources are starting to be revealed as biased — or to put it another way, unscientific. Things become unmoored. But the media cannot easily switch to purely and strictly following honest science, because then they start to lose control of the discussion: scientific logic and rigorous consideration of evidence take over. This the media’s masters cannot allow, and not just because of what is at stake in the COVID-origin debate, but because that spirit of inquiry leads to all manner of questions that will always be uncomfortable until satisfactorily answered. Such as: how did President Kennedy manage to get shot in the front from the back? How did three steel-frame skyscrapers collapse from fire for the first time in history, all on the same day? How could President Reagan be so birdbrained as to sell arms to arch-enemy Iran, unless he owed them something?

There’s no easy resolution to this dilemma, but if you want my two cents’ worth, I’m inclined to go with the truth, lest we yield our reason. Call out scientific institutions and their mouthpieces who disinform, and the media who report them uncritically, even if extremists may temporarily use it to their advantage, because in the long run rationalists’ advantage will be greater. All tyranny, petty and grand, is based on lies. Reasoning, fragile and fallible though it be, is the strongest weapon against tyranny. It is also both the guarantor and the strongest exercise of individualism. Surely this is something that elements of left and right can agree on.

[i] Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, quoted in Nicholas Wade, “The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 05 May 2021.

[ii] See Yuri Deigin for a detailed analysis.