Whence Covid?

In a comprehensive piece on Medium, longtime science journalist Nicholas Wade digs into what we know—and what we still don’t—about the late 2019 genesis of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan. “There are two main theories about its origin. One is that it jumped naturally from wildlife to people. The other is that the virus was under study in a lab, from which it escaped. It matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence,” he writes, noting there is “no direct evidence” for either theory, but that most of the clues point toward a lab leak. “It’s documented that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing gain-of-function experiments designed to make coronaviruses infect human cells and humanized mice. This is exactly the kind of experiment from which a SARS2-like virus could have emerged. The researchers were not vaccinated against the viruses under study, and they were working in the minimal safety conditions of a BSL2 laboratory. So escape of a virus would not be at all surprising. In all of China, the pandemic broke out on the doorstep of the Wuhan institute.”

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