Notes from an Environmentalist. Did we Drop the Ball on the Lab Leak Hypothesis?
Dropping the Ball;
On The Lab Leak Hypothesis
The debate about the origins of Covid goes on and on, but now there is a new realization that scientific journals and mainstream media were so concerned with not being identified with Trump’s misinformation about Chinese bioweapons that they missed the simple point that a lab accident was just as plausible, if not more so, than a spillover event.
In fact, four years on, epidemiologists have yet to identify the animal that the virus supposedly spilled over from, while virologists and public health officials warn ever more forcefully about the dangers of Gain of Function research.
In her new book, Doppelganger Naomi Klein writes, “Even though more and more facts and documents were piling up that supported serious consideration of the lab leak hypothesis most liberals and leftists didn’t bother looking..”
Similar words have been written in Scientific American, the Columbia Journalism Review and NPR’s “On the Media with Brooke Gladstone.”
A recent study in Risk Analysis looked at the peculiarities of Covid, its geographic distribution, rapid spread and mode of transmission and concluded that the pandemic was more likely to have originated in a laboratory than from a spillover event.
Canada also arrested a Canadian scientist who reportedly snuck viruses out of Canada and used them doing Gain of Function style research in the lab of the bat lady at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan.
As more information comes out we may ultimately learn the true origins of the pandemic that killed over 16 million people and crippled the global economy.
Hopefully it will be received and evaluated in a less politically wrought environment.
Attached is the cover of my book, which was actually the first book to come out which asked the question if Covid could have come about from a simple lab accident. I hope we will learn the definitive answer someday.