Scientists and political commentators are no longer dismissing the possibility that COVID-19 emerged from a Chinese laboratory. What changed? Washingt

The Sudden Rise of the Coronavirus Lab-Leak Theory

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2021-05-27 20:30:03

Scientists and political commentators are no longer dismissing the possibility that COVID-19 emerged from a Chinese laboratory. What changed?

Washington, D.C., has little love for mystery. Politicians prefer the news to supply certainty: two antagonists, clear moral stakes, the chance to take a side. But for more than a year the starting point of the dominant political story, the coronavirus pandemic, has been mysterious. Among conservatives, predisposed to hawkishness toward China, where the virus had come from, attention focussed on the possibility that the COVID-19 pathogen had emerged from a Chinese lab, either by accident or design. Liberals sought a more explicit alignment with scientific investigators, and favored an account in which the virus had migrated naturally from animals to humans, possibly through the Chinese markets where exotic animals are sold for human consumption. The right’s theory, at best, blamed science run amok, and at worst, suspected an unprecedented act of biowarfare. (“It was the ‘incompetence of China,’ and nothing else, that did this mass Worldwide killing,” President Trump tweeted in May, 2020.) The left’s theory blamed an unreconstructed pre-modern approach to wildlife that, instead of protecting it, killed and ate it. For a year, each camp occupied the seats that they liked best: liberals in the mainstream, conservatives on the fringe. This spring, though the evidence for either side has not changed much, there has been news in this area. Scientists and political commentators have become less swift to dismiss the lab-leak theory. And so, the political debate over the pandemic’s origins became a case study in something else: how the political world does and doesn’t change its mind.

Political actors have restaged the same argument so frequently during the past few years that it can sometimes seem as if they are only ever having a single fight. The argument is invariably about some scientific or intellectual consensus, and it follows a general pattern. First, conservative media or political figures notice what seems to them a glitch in the consensus—a situation in which liberals might be using the slogans of science and objectivity as a cover for a partisan political endeavor. Then liberals react, and often overreact, by insisting that the scientific or intellectual consensus is, in fact, ironclad, and introduce prominent members of the relevant field to say so in public. (This is the “circling the wagons” phase.) Often, there is a third stage, in which certain center-left dissenters become exasperated by the overstatements of the liberals, and point out more technical issues with the consensus, frequently based in previously arcane sub-specialty disputes. These left dissenters then sometimes make jarring, slightly comic appearances on, for instance (or, specifically), “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

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