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Peggy Noonan and the common sense of COVID

Peggy Noonan has a remarkable column in the Wall Street Journal today about the COVID lab-leak theory. Before I get to that, though, let's review why we're talking about this at all. A few days ago the Journal reported that:

  • The Department of Energy had gathered some new intelligence about the possibility of a lab leak.
  • DOE wouldn't tell us what it was.
  • Whatever it was, it changed no minds in the other intelligence agencies it was shared with.
  • DOE itself said it now believed in the lab-leak theory only with "low confidence."

I believe this is a fair summary of what happened, and it doesn't strike me as something that should push your beliefs very hard in one direction or another.

Now let's return to Noonan. She writes today that "common sense" suggests COVID was leaked from a lab. After all, it originated in a city with an important biological lab. I won't deny that this is provocative, but it's not remotely conclusive to any reasonable person. Noonan sort of admits that, but then says she and other conservatives got increasingly suspicious because experts were all working so hard to debunk the lab-leak hypothesis:

Why were so many others, not in the government but on social media and in the professions, so invested in the idea that the origin had nothing to do with a lab? Part of it was knee-jerk partisan thinking: Our political opposites think it happened in a Chinese lab because they’re xenophobic. Others were thinking diplomatically: Why increase tensions with China when there are already more than enough? Some were thinking practically: If China gets defensive, it’ll only withhold more data just when we need it most. Others appeared mysteriously uninterested in the lab-leak theory because, as we now know, there was something to hide: U.S. funding of the Wuhan lab. The National Institutes of Health admitted in October 2021 that it funded research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

This is quite a list, but Noonan manages to miss the most important possibility: Experts were invested in the idea that the origin had nothing to do with a lab leak because they thought it was wrong. They believed the evidence pointed pretty strongly to a zoonotic spillover, as with SARS and MERS and Ebola and HIV and every other virus dangerous to humans. And like responsible people everywhere, they hated the idea of conspiracy theories spreading that, in their opinion, were both wrong and unhelpful.

Are the experts mistaken? Maybe. It happens. But unless you're a virologist yourself it's really not possible for you to understand the evidence. That's frustrating, but it is what it is. The people who do understand the evidence almost universally believe COVID was produced naturally, just like every other pandemic virus in human history.

And since there have been hundreds of pandemics over the ages, it was inevitable that eventually the lottery would produce one in a city with a large biological research lab. I won't deny that this is a helluva coincidence. I won't deny that Chinese intransigence is suspicious. I won't deny that we haven't yet identified an animal pathway for COVID.

But the virology community pretty unanimously believes the genetic structure of the COVID virus shows no signs of an artificial origin, either engineered or accidental. Any honest discussion of COVID needs to acknowledge this in some depth—without immediately dismissing it by resorting to some juvenile snark about "peer reviewed" being worthless garbage these days.

If you want a personal opinion, I'd say the evidence is 95-5 in favor of a zoonotic origin of COVID. There's a small chance it was produced during routine research in a lab and then accidentally released, and there's nothing wrong with continuing to look into that. But right now there's lots and lots of evidence for a natural origin and virtually none for a lab origin.

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  2. eminpasha

    It would be useful to have an official council of virologists able to make the relevant advisories. As it is, we're all relying on our impressions of what they're collectively saying. FWIW, my impression is that the community has become more undecided over time, and that today a majority of them fall in the undecided camp.

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