In April the Trump White House paved over the informational public health website Covid.gov with what can only be described as a splashy propaganda page. “LAB LEAK,” it shouted in large font at the top, movie-poster style, with Donald Trump’s image positioned between the enormous capital letters as an A-list star investigator. The tagline: “The true origins of Covid-19.”
Five years ago, this kind of conspiratorial slide deck would have scandalized normie liberals and dominated at least a news cycle or two. Even three years ago, it might have also been self-sabotage: If there was a genuine lab leak cover-up, well, where had President Trump himself been on all this in 2020?
But the tide has turned, so much so that we’ve moved on somewhat from debating the competing scientific claims to treating the origins of the pandemic primarily as a test of political independence and intellectual integrity that various people either passed or failed. Two-thirds of Americans believe the Covid-19 virus came out of a lab, and though those numbers have been high for a long time now, low–confidence intelligence assessments have moved in that direction as well. Tellingly, elite discourse has come around, too, even on the center-left — perhaps partly out of regrets about 2020 and partly because the 2024 election was another shock to the confidence of America’s institutionalists and establishmentarians. Five years ago, liberals might have cited the theory as one of the first or second pieces of evidence that Trump and his coalition were racist. These days liberals are much more likely to cite the theory and the way leaders initially addressed it as examples of pandemic overreach.
But the science remains far more ambiguous and unsettled, with many prominent and unimpeachably pedigreed figures going so far as to call the lab leak theory a dead end and large surveys, though imperfect, showing significant support among virologists and epidemiologists for a natural origin explanation. With Covid, of course, everything is topsy-turvy — our memories distorted and our resentments contorted by years of death and anomie. But as we watch the public narrative shift and harden without new evidence to really prompt it, I think a few observations about the course of the discourse are nevertheless worth staking out. Here are six.
It’s not just in America that the tide of the argument has turned.
In March, German media reported that the country’s foreign intelligence service had concluded with 80 to 90 percent confidence that the virus had come out of a lab — and that the service did so as far back as 2020. In April the French Academy of Medicine came out in support of a lab origin, too, with 97 percent of its members voting in favor of that theory. These groups don’t represent all the world’s scientists (who in surveys tend to prefer a natural origin explanation) or all the world’s intelligence operatives (the American ones, for instance, have been divided). And they haven’t introduced meaningful new data, whose underlying fact pattern hasn’t changed in years, such that zoonosis can still win out in public debates. But the conclusions are nevertheless striking — and a reminder to Americans that it is probably a mistake to attribute whiplash on these questions entirely to our partisan dynamics.
Perhaps distance from the heated arguments of 2020 has simply allowed more laypeople to see things a bit more clearly. Perhaps we feel so burned by pandemic expertise that we’re revisiting anything it told us early on with a more skeptical eye. Or perhaps we’re converging on a new consensus for reasons other than hard evidence, surfing waves of reflexive distrust and telling ourselves it’s free thinking.
If you are a lab-leak believer, you might not have thought enough about the responsibility of Trump.
Conservatives raging about pandemic response have long since memory-holed the fact that it was Trump who was in the White House through 2020, presiding over the country during some of its strictest mitigation measures — and even pressuring social media companies into more aggressive content moderation.
But few may even know that it was under the Trump administration in 2017 when the National Institutes of Health lifted an Obama-era pause on gain-of-function funding in what may have looked at the time like an inside-baseball argument among scientists but now looks more like a strike against liberal safetyism, which reopened the door to the kinds of research the American right now reflexively blames for the pandemic (even if they also dispute the death tolls and whether the virus should have scared us at all).
There was an early effort to control debate, but it didn’t work very well.
The “Proximal Origin” paper, which asserted a natural origin in the pages of Nature and has since become the touchstone event of the supposed coverup, was published on March 17, 2020. That month, according to Pew, 29 percent of Americans believed Covid had come out of a lab — not at all an insignificant share. According to another pollster, by May, just two months later, it was 49 percent. More recent polling, conducted in 2023, shows the lab-leak believers at 66 percent. Altogether, this means that Americans came around to the lab origin theory of Covid-19 remarkably quickly, even during the period many now remember as an episode of quasi-Orwellian thought policing.
How did that happen? The simple answer is that while the theory was routinely disparaged in public, that is not the same thing as being outright censored. It was in late April 2020 that Trump was asked by reporters at the White House whether he’d seen evidence that gave him a “high degree of confidence” in a lab origin, and he responded with a resounding “yes.” The next month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said there was “enormous evidence” that the virus had originated in a Chinese lab. At other points that spring, Trump administration officials were more coy about the question, and though it is easy to attribute these dynamics to simple partisanship, one way of interpreting them is not as an argument between elites and outsiders but as between rivalrous groups of elites. At the time, even nonpartisan biosecurity experts like Filippa Lentzos of King’s College of London were discussing the need for an investigation into the origin of the pandemic. That fall, Boston magazine published a story exploring the lab leak hypothesis focused on the Broad Institute’s Alina Chan, who had been publicly asking questions about the virus and where it came from for many months at that point. Just after the new year, New York magazine did the same, in an article by Nicholson Baker, which I commissioned and edited. To help promote his argument, Baker gave a long interview to MSNBC. It was friendly.
That interview and the article were in many ways exceptions to prove the rule. In general, as my Times Opinion colleague Zeynep Tufekci has written, the country’s liberal institutions — scientific, political and media — lined up against the lab leak theory, engaging in some good-faith argumentation and some bad-faith suppression. But that informational cordon sanitaire was far from leakproof, and however Orwellian this period looks in your memory, over the first 18 months of the pandemic, arguments for a lab origin weren’t exactly secret knowledge or real samizdat so much as familiar ideas that carried some mix of liberal disrepute and transgressive charge. When Jon Stewart delivered his “chocolate factory” theory on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” in June 2021, the audience didn’t boo or gasp in shock. Stewart got laughs and applause. Colbert was perfectly happy to play along.
The bad behavior, while not all that effective, also wasn’t trivial.
“Proximal Origin” was rushed into print and probably overstated its headline claim — “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus” — even if the full paper was a bit more nuanced. And although several scientists who wrote it privately harbored doubts and suspicions, none were transparent in public about them or how they were persuaded otherwise, until their private Slacks and emails came out several years later. In the meantime, there were many news conferences, interviews and media appearances pointing to that paper as effective or even definitive proof. Another letter published the same month in The Lancet went even further, calling lab leak explicitly a conspiracy theory.
For all the ongoing outrage about social media censorship, the bans on lab leak commentary were much shorter and came much later than you probably remember: Facebook put its ban in place in February 2021, for instance, and lifted it in May of that year. Of course, outside of outright bans, the social media platforms were also tweaking their algorithms, though much of the manipulation later publicized as the Twitter Files concerned vaccine content, not discussion of pandemic origins.
Eventually, there would be what were, in my mind, other examples of regrettable behavior from scientists and public officials: haphazard research that got overhyped in the press, stonewalled FOIA requests and congressionally mandated intelligence reports that did not satisfy the transparency requirements of the law, squirrelly Senate testimony that was at least evasive and, some believe, tiptoed up to the line of perjury. There were even allegations from intelligence community whistle-blowers that some analysts were paid to change their assessment from lab leak to natural origin. The C.I.A. has denied the allegation, but this all looks to me quite bad. Yet in retrospect, the larger effect might not have been to starve the American public of information so much as to briefly constrain the boundaries of high-visibility liberal discourse, such that a large swath of scientists and politicians and journalists were for a time operating as though only one account of pandemic origins was legitimate and plausible, when, in fact, much of the audience for those lectures already believed otherwise. And believing that, they resented being told they were wrong — not just because some things might have been hidden from them but also because they simply didn’t appreciate being patronized.
If the lab leak believers had won the debate sooner, it almost certainly would have meant a different pandemic response.
You may remember the moment, in the nervous and uncertain days of February 2020, when Senator Tom Cotton described Covid-19 as a potential bioweapon in a Fox News interview — though he never actually used that phrase or even explicitly endorsed the theory. You may not remember, because of everything that followed, that this was a time when, if you were trying to take account of partisan divergence about Covid, you’d probably say that those raising the loudest alarm about the novel coronavirus were conservatives, while the liberal establishment — up to and including Anthony Fauci — were trying to reassure the country that the threat was minuscule.
In the months that followed, the pandemic response was remarkably uniform, without much variation between red and blue states — in policy or behavior — until the fall. Would things have played out differently if the pandemic origin discourse had played out differently, too, with a more open discussion leading, perhaps, to a stronger lab leak consensus as early as that spring? It’s always seemed to me intuitive that it would have, and always seemed strange to me how many people were arguing in 2020 and 2021 that the question of origin was immaterial: However many times you’ve seen “Outbreak” or “Contagion,” the possibility of a virus purposefully engineered for pandemic spread escaping all the safety protocols designed to keep it from the public is straightforwardly and intuitively scarier than something that came to us from civets or raccoon dogs. At the very least, it’s easy to imagine how a different conversation about origins would have scrambled pandemic partisanship, with China hawks on the right forming a natural alignment with those most agitated about the risks of the disease and the threat it represented. Which is to say: One glossed-over aspect of the origins discourse today is that if the lab leak theory had spread more widely and more quickly in 2020 than it did, it is not hard to imagine that the result would have been harsher mitigation measures, justified by right-wing concerns as much as left-wing ones.
But it is the geopolitical stakes that loom even larger.
These days, when Americans argue in favor of a lab origin, raging about a coverup, they tend to focus on Fauci and the American scientific establishment — as though the stakes were somewhat confined to our own domestic culture war. But if the lab leak thesis had become elite conventional wisdom in 2020, the obvious implication would not have been that the pandemic was therefore the fault of U.S. scientists and federal funding (though we might have gotten to that conclusion eventually). The first implication would have been that it was the responsibility of a foreign adversary, the world’s other major superpower, with whom the country had been steadily intensifying tensions for years — indeed, has intensified them even further in the years that followed.
Perhaps you feel it never could’ve gotten that far, given that so many eminent scientists still believe the theory is a dead end. But if you believe that in 2020 the powers that be mishandled this question, that is the upshot: that, in the absence of interference the lab leak hypothesis would have and should have spread more rapidly, both through the American public and up through its leadership class.
And what would it have meant for it to take deeper root in that context, with a pandemic that ultimately resulted in tens of millions of excess deaths becoming immediately a central point of conflict in what we now pretty casually call a new cold war? The diplomatic stakes would have seemed titanic, given the scale of death and disruption, whose only historical precedents would have been acts of war. Almost certainly, given national leadership, the United States would have been even more focused on the matter of blame, with public arguments between Trump and Xi Jinping becoming both more theatrical and more consequential, perhaps quite overwhelming the global response with arguments over responsibility as well. The World Health Organization would have been caught even more in the middle and been even more hamstrung than it proved to be. Perhaps those in nations outside of China would have been more skeptical that the Chinese approach to disease suppression through lockdown was an admirable model — although, then again, perhaps not, since pandemics produce their own fears and fogs of war. The logic of pandemic diplomacy might have accelerated global vaccination programs — though there, too, perhaps not. But almost certainly, a more pervasive conviction that Covid-19 began in a Wuhan lab would have bolstered the position of China hawks in the national security establishment and pushed the country even deeper into great-power conflict.
Where exactly that would have led, in the midst of so much panic and death and disruption, is an unsettling question of alternative history. Maybe it would have only accelerated somewhat the confrontational politics of the last few years. Or maybe it would have led somewhere even more jagged and combative, in the midst and on the basis of Covid’s once-in-a-century global spasm of mass death.
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