When HIV/AIDS emerged in the 1980s, it was alleged, with a little Soviet help, that the virus had been developed in an American lab. Between Washingto

The Lab Leak Theory Doesn’t Hold Up

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2021-06-15 20:30:04

When HIV/AIDS emerged in the 1980s, it was alleged, with a little Soviet help, that the virus had been developed in an American lab. Between Washington’s inaction on the epidemic and its sordid past of shady experiments, proponents said the theory couldn’t be dismissed out of hand.

After many early cases of tick-borne Lyme disease were first identified around Long Island Sound, it was deemed too much of a coincidence that the U.S. military’s Plum Island animal research lab sat on an island in the sound itself.

When SARS emerged in 2003, so did fears of the severe acute respiratory syndrome’s unnatural origin. “It’s a very unusual outbreak,” bioweapons expert Ken Alibek told the New York Times at the time. “It’s hard to say whether it’s deliberate or natural.” One Russian scientist posited that “the propagation of the atypical pneumonia may well be caused by a leak of a combat virus grown in Asian bacteriological weapons labs.”

And in recent years, efforts to eradicate Ebola have been hobbled by attacks on health care workers motivated, at least in part, by a belief that the virus is man-made.

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