The reason that Republicans keep pushing the lab leak theory isn’t because they believe it. The reason that the lab leak theory is being accepted as fact on Fox News isn’t because there is new evidence. The reason that the lab leak theory is at the heart of a laundry list of claims about COVID-19 being circulated around social media isn’t because it’s considered one bit more likely by scientists who have examined the evidence.

The lab leak theory is being pushed by people who want to say that Donald Trump was “right” about COVID-19. It’s being pushed, along with false claims about hydroxychloroquine and false allegations against Dr. Anthony Fauci, entirely for the purpose of distracting from how Donald Trump’s actions led directly to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Period.

Thursday, Jun 17, 2021 · 2:32:08 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner

Note: I’m aware that the title being seen by some is missing a word. It should read “no new information” rather than just “new information.” However, correcting the system that generates alternate headlines once they’ve been generated is difficult. So I can only apologize.

This doesn’t mean that it is impossible that the SARS-CoV-2 virus first infected humans at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or even at some other site where viruses are studied. That is entirely possible. It also doesn’t meant this is the motivation behind everyone who accepts this theory. It’s neat. It’s obliquely satisfying in the sense of every story that involves “someone f##ked up” is satisfying. It doesn’t have the maddening ambiguity of the idea that some animal, somewhere, at some time, passed along a version of the virus to some human.

People like to believe that things happen for a purpose, and that coincidences have meaning. And it’s exactly that inclination that Trump supporters are leaning on to get reasonable people to buy into a theory that remains not just one of several, but “highly unlikely” in the opinion of the experts who investigated the idea.

As Foreign Policy points out, this isn’t the first time people tried to jump straight from “there’s a new disease” straight to “someone caused it.” HIV was blamed on experiments by the U.S. government. Speculation suggested that SARS was the result of bioweapons research. Health care workers in Africa have been assaulted by people who believe the disease was manmade and planted there by foreign governments. Many people pointed out that Lyme disease was first identified in the area immediately adjacent to the U.S. military’s Plum Island animal research lab. 

Humans are inference engines. Given a jumble of facts, even random events, people try to find connections. It’s exactly that oh-so-satisfying search for a neat solution to a complex puzzle that has driven the species’ success. Science is an outgrowth of that desire to find patterns in chaos. But then, so is QAnon. And in the case of the lab leak theory, that perfectly rational, perfectly human tendency to seek clear answers is being manipulated by people who want to help everyone find their way to the answer that would help them best, by being item one on the “exonerate Donald Trump” wish list. 

That doesn’t mean that should definitive evidence come out indicting the lab in Wuhan, or any other facility, that it would in any way redeem Trump’s performance. His failure not just to take effective action, but to block effective action, was entirely independent of the virus’ origin. The lab leak theory is a distraction.

But even as a distraction, it has a purpose: undermining faith in the experts who have, from the outset, pointed out that the most likely route of transmission was zoonotic transfer. It’s a punt, being undertaken by the same team that is currently taking action to block public health officials from taking effective action against future pandemics and preventing any restrictions that would encourage the use of vaccines.

There are currently 219 viruses known to infect humans. Of those, the number that infected humans by zoonotic transfer is approximately 219. The number known to have entered the human population after first passing through a lab is 0. That doesn’t mean there have not been lab accidents with known viruses. There have been many lab accidents with known viruses. Some of them extremely serious. But that’s a very different thing from blaming a lab for the first incidence of a new infection.

Multiple outlets, including many that should know better, have pushed stories in the last few days that suggest the lab escape theory is supported by new evidence or is gaining adherents in the scientific community. Driving this idea are claims by former CDC Director Robert Redfield, an article from the Wall Street Journal claiming “exquisite” intelligence about researchers in Wuhan falling ill, unsupported statements from scientists not directly involved in coronavirus research, and papers from scam artists pretending to be scientists. 

Asked about the supposed new evidence in support of the lab leak theory, the scientist appointed by the World Health Organizations to investigate the origins of the virus put it succinctly. They are still working to discover that origin, and when it comes to the lab leak theory, “This ‘growing body of evidence’—we haven’t seen it.”

As The Washington Post makes clear, that lack of evidence doesn’t come from lack of trying. Teams of scientists examined the genetic sequence of the virus, and despite seeing new features that at first made them worry that the virus might have been engineered in some way, within weeks “the scientists unanimously concluded there was no evidence of lab manipulation.” Even after scientists had come to agree with the early WHO announcement that the virus had most likely been transmitted to humans from animals, the effort to prove otherwise continued from “Public health officials, intelligence officers and officials at the State Department and the National Security Council.” It was actually a State Department website belonging to the U.S. Embassy in Georgia that published the “fact sheet” which formed the basis of the Wall Street Journal article. That sheet was posted by an unknown State Department employee in the days just before Trump left office.

That search put people within the government under enormous stress to find an answer that would please Trump. As the Post reports:

Not providing evidence of the lab escape theory was seen as a weak position that represented risk to agencies and individuals. Even so, those agencies were not able to actually find a “smoking gun” that connected the virus and the lab.

There are certainly experts who don’t believe that the features of the virus show any sign of human manipulation. That includes NIH Director Francis Collins, who says that “An expert trying to design an even more effective coronavirus would never have come up with this design.” That’s because the way SARS-CoV-2 attacks human cells is genuinely novel, and not something simply borrowed from other related viruses. It’s the unique result of evolution, with features “so unusual that a human could not have imagined them.”

At the same time Collins supports the continued search for the origin of the virus and explicitly does not rule out the lab escape theory. Neither does Anthony Fauci. Neither does the World Health Organization, That’s why both the U.S. government and the WHO are continuing with investigations into the origin of the virus.

However, people should be prepared for it to take years to get that answer. And when we do, it may seem to come out of left field. After all, while scientists have generally agreed that an outbreak at the Wuhan Seafood Market represents the first-known superspreader event for COVID-19, this could be several weeks and many miles removed from the actual origin of the disease. The SARS-CoV-2 virus may have been transmitted from animal to human at a site in rural China hundreds of miles from where that first outbreak emerged. Future surveys may find antibodies of a related disease in some wholly different region of the country, leading to the eventual deamination of an animal source—that’s what happened with SARS. It may also turn out that the virus came from just nine miles down the road, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

By now, it likely seems as if you’ve read this same article ten thousand times. Believe me, it feels like I’ve written it ten million times. There is nothing wrong with believing that the virus may have first escaped into the human population at the Wuhan lab. That is a real possibility—even if WHO continues to think that it’s an unlikely possibility.

But the idea that this question has been put to bed, along with the idea that the scientific community has tried to cover up the origin, is a lie with a purpose. That purpose needs to be fought, even if it takes a lot of repetition.