The media’s lab leak fiasco – Slow Boring
Among actual scientists, it is much less clear to me what the conventional wisdom ever actually ways. Politifact s now-retracted fact check deeming lab leak theorists to have their pants on fire ran in September 2020. Also in September of 2020, Boston magazine ran a profile of Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Harvard-MIT Broad Institute, who believes the virus escaped from the biolab in Wuhan. It s clear from the article that while Chan perhaps had a minority viewpoint, this was the kind of thing that was the subject of ongoing disagreement among researchers. And the main thing about it, as best I can tell, is that we just have a long history of viruses crossing from animals to humans so virologists baseline belief about a new virus is going to be that it came from animals.
When New York Magazine ran its lab leak theory story in January 2021, I tweeted disparaging things about it only to be told quietly by a number of research scientists that I was wrong and plenty of people in the science community thought this was plausible.
By March, Biden was in office and his team was arguing that China was not being sufficiently forthcoming about the origin of the virus. In May, a distinguished group of scientists called for a more rigorous inquiry.
Because there is obviously a big media fuckup angle to this story, the two biggest deal accounts for a lot of media-skeptics are Donald McNeil making the case for a lab leak and Nicholas Wade making the case for a lab leak because those are both veteran science reporters who got cancelled. But I do think it s important to try to understand exactly who got what wrong here. My best assessment is to agree with Josh Rogin that this is a case of a smallish group of reporters and fact-checkers proclaiming a scientific consensus where none ever really existed.
IMHO this all seems like a mildly disgusting effort at self-justification. But judge for yourself.