As everyone must have noticed, the idea that Covid-19 originated in a leak from a lab in Wuhan where 'gain-of-function' experiments were being conducted has gone from being 'conspiracy theory' to 'hmm, looking likely'. If things follow their usual course it will soon become "definitely - what do you mean you believed all that nonsense about wet markets?!"
I am still sceptical about this on simple probability grounds. The situation since last January is that we do not know for sure where the Covid-19 virus came from or how it got into the human population. I lean towards its being a zoonotic origin and transmission rather than a lab leak for the following reason, illustrated by this analogy. Suppose you want to find out how something got to a destination X and there are two possible origin points, A (zoonotic transmission) and B (lab leak). There are many different ways you can get from A to X but only one route from B to X. This means it is more likely (but not certain) that A is the origin and this hypothesis gets additional weight if there are known previous cases where this kind of thing has happened (as there are). The one thing that would definitely make B a better candidate would be if the cumulative barriers to passage from B to X were clearly lower than from A to X but, as far as we know they are not.
That said, if idiots around the world keep on doing gain-of-function experiments on pathogens then sooner or later we will have a pandemic caused by a lab accident and it could well be a near-extinction level one, caused by a 'maximally deadly' pathogen that people have produced just to see how it works. This is the kind of crazy risk taking that gets you killed at the individual level.
That said, I am more interested in the way the media is going on. (Another similar phenomenon is the Pentagon suddenly announcing that hey there really are UFOs). There is a really strong odour of "We Have Always Been At War With East Asia" here. I do wonder what lies behind the way the shoal has suddenly swerved and changed course, regardless of the actual facts of the question. We don't live in a world where the Party can order the Ministry of Truth to suddenly rewrite all the newspapers but we do have a pronounced pack or shoal effect in what counts as the media.
The other thing to say is that if it does prove to be the case that the pandemic began with a lab leak of a tweaked pathogen (personally I doubt this but suppose that either it is clearly shown to be the case or it becomes generally believed to be the case, which amounts to the same thing) the effects will be seismic. I'm not talking primarily about Sino-American relations, I mean the impact on wider perceptions of the media, science, and the role of experts.
