Editor’s Note: Two days ago we linked to a NY Times piece which claimed that the COVID pandemic probably started in a lab in China. But we don’t want to give the impression that there is scientific consensus behind this view.
Mathew Ingram at the Columbia Journalism Review:
The uncomfortable truth is that, four and a half years after COVID first appeared, there is still no consensus on where it originated, even if the deranged conspiracy theories about Fauci and others can be safely ruled out. Even scientists who specialize in virology can’t seem to agree. Writing in the New York Times this week, a molecular biologist who works for an institute backed by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argued that COVID most likely escaped from a lab, based on a number of points that she articulated. And yet, just hours after that op-ed was published, a virologist went through it point by point on X and argued that the evidence remains unclear. In a recently published survey of more than a hundred and fifty virologists, epidemiologists, and other researchers, a slim majority said they believe that COVID likely emerged naturally from transmission between infected animals.
More here. And also see this, and this.