The Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory Is a Tale of Weaponized Uncertainty

The virus that causes Covid-19 is called SARS-CoV-2. It’s in a viral family called coronaviruses, several of which infect humans. It’s the third coronavirus to cause a pandemic this century.

China’s most important laboratory for the study of emerging viruses—including coronaviruses—is in Wuhan. It’s the only lab in the country with Biosafety Level 4 facilities, the most secure on the BSL scale.

Some scientists at that lab in Wuhan were doing coronavirus research under a lesser security grade, BSL-2 as opposed to BSL-4.

In February of 2020, a Chinese researcher posted a preprint—so not peer-reviewed or published—suggesting that the virus that causes Covid-19 might have escaped from a lab after having been created by humans as a research project.

The biology of SARS-CoV-2 strongly suggests a natural origin and no human modification—a “zoonotic spillover” from wild animals, either directly to humans or first to domestic animals and then to humans.

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