The Implications of the Lab-Leak Hypothesis

Whether or not the coronavirus pandemic is the result of a lab leak, the Chinese government has behaved terribly in blocking any real investigation into its origins. And if the pandemic was the result of a leak, those who let it happen and those who presumably helped cover it up deserve some real blame, for the millions who ve lost their lives and all of those who have otherwise suffered from the virus. But so would the American scientists who inaugurated this kind of research, and those who oversaw and helped fund it. Indeed, if we take the lab-leak theory seriously even, as Engber suggests, act as though it is true the most direct lesson is ultimately much simpler than geopolitics. It would mean that what is probably the gravest global public-health crisis in a century bore a human signature. That signature would spell hubris, since even the most innocent possible lab-leak origin story still involves the large-scale hunting, collecting, gathering, and transporting of exotic animal viruses for storage in centralized facilities facilities often much closer to human populations than the diseases had been naturally, and which, in at least this one very consequential case, had failed the basic functions of security and safety. If Chernobyl canceled our nuclear future, or at least delayed it a generation or two, then surely a lab-leak version of COVID-19 might entirely eliminate this genre of virus research, too.

via nymag.com

Given that the benefits of gain-of-function research are basically vaporware, at least outside of the “benefits” of better bioweapons, which I assume is one of the reasons the PRC is so interested in it, I don’t think there should be much of a debate over not doing it anymore. Because it’s too dangerous. The probability of its causing global pandemics is essentially one. Affected virologists should consider learning to code. Or we could given them each a golden parachute of a billion dollars — that would be much cheaper than letting them play with deadly viruses.

This New York Magazine piece does not acknowledge and is apparently unaware of the reporting in RedState regarding a high-level Chinese defector at DIA. Surely this is “new evidence” or at least the allegation of new evidence? I guess Blue State world will not worry about such things as PRC penetration of the FBI and CIA until somebody writes a story about it in the left-liberal bubble world?

And there’s poor Dr. Le Ming Yan of course. I guess she doesn’t count because she was warning about this too early and then Tucker Carlson picked up her story while the FBI mysteriously ignored her, as if she were Hunter Biden’s laptop. It’s not enough to blow the whistle anymore. You have to blow the right sort of whistle at the right time.

Jennifer at RedState does overstate her case by assuming that Covid is itself a bioweapon when at most she presents testimony from this alleged unnamed defector at DIA that the PRC’s PLA was doing research and was perhaps ultimately in charge of all research at the Wuhan Institute. But they’re not quite the same thing. Perhaps the Saving the World Department and the Killing Everybody Who’s not in the CCP Department are two separate departments in Wuhan. They may have separate coffee makers and everything. To be fair, I hear through the RC’s global network of sources that some NIH virologists just assume by looking at it that of course the coronavirus is a bioweapon, the way a tank is a land weapon or a frigate is a sea weapon. I mean, look at it, dude! But I don’t know why this might be, being unvirological myself. It didn’t work terribly well as a bioweapon unless you count, well, how much devastation it did to our economies. But who could have predicted that? It could have been, one supposes, just a dangerous byproduct of ongoing bioweapons research, that had a dual purpose in that there are the notional benefits of gain-of-function/prevention-of-future-pandemics research. And if that benefits the PLA’s bioweapons program, well, that’s not the US scientists’ fault now is it? That’s not my department, says Wehrner von Braun.