Lab leak revisited
Aug 23, 2026
THE lab leak community has got very excited by the plea bargain agreed this week by David Morens, a former senior advisor to Anthony Fauci. Presumably in exchange for a lighter sentence for “covering up” the origins of COVID, Morens has dobbed in Peter Daszak, the former head of the EcoHealth Alliance and now ubiquitous pandemic scapegoat, as a co-conspirator.
In the Trump administration’s ongoing campaign against elderly scientists, Morens was charged with concealing federal records related to coronavirus research, and of using his private email to discuss that research, which violates federal law. For the lab leak aficionados, this is another layer of evidence that SARS-2 was manmade and somehow instigated by the Fauci brigade.
Alas, for people in need of closure, Morens’ admission of guilt does not itself constitute evidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and barely moves the dial one way or another in the great mystery of our age. The dogged Gilles Demaneuf, who is behind the DRASTIC research team looking into the origins of COVID, is however delighted that Daszak might be getting his own day in court very soon.
Meanwhile, a defiant Daszak is still tweeting: “Just because people want a ‘mad scientist’ ‘China=evil’ narrative to be true, just saying it over and over again don’t make it so.” He cites a very thorough debunking of the lab leak narrative published by the science writer Philipp Markolin this week, which deserves some attention.
Amid an apparent perceptual shift from zoonosis to lab leak over the last few years, it is worth noting that the underlying science hasn't fundamentally changed, Markolin claims:
The weight of scientific evidence for a zoonotic origin is extremely unlikely to be overturned at this point. It is in fact consolidating into a scientific consensus as key publications and new information or analyses are slowly diffusing through, mulled over, and unsuccessfully challenged by the wider scientific community. That includes Dr. [Alina] Chan, who has long given up trying to bring her arguments to scientific journals and rather brings them to willing newspapers and politicians instead.
Markolin also points out that the "lab leak" hypothesis has never been a single testable hypothesis, but a series of suppositions and allegations, some of which are "mutually contradictory":
In reality, it is an amalgamation of origin claims that differ in mechanism, emergence route, in what would count as evidence for or against them, and in prior plausibility: deliberate construction of a bioweapon; de-novo genome assembly, gain-of-function research with genetic engineering or serial-passage adaptation of a bat virus; in vitro cultivation of a bat virus that escaped containment; or infection of a fieldworker or laboratory worker who then carried the virus to the city.
Markolin also carefully explains why SARS-CoV-2 couldn’t have had anything to do with the so-called gain-of-function research supposedly being promoted by Fauci, Daszak et al, using scientific language I have no hope of understanding. Suffice it to say that its genome "is a recombinant mosaic that could not be assembled in a lab" and it has all the hallmarks of evolution, not design.
This is all very well, but for the scientifically disadvantaged, the prima facie elements of the pandemic have never quite passed the fishiness test. And it has always been far easier to smell out fishiness than to understand and internalise complex information about SARS-CoV-2's "novel RBD motif", the "out-of-frame insertion of a non-canonical motif" in the furin cleavage site or the "new cleavage synergy with a proximal glycosylation and sequence motif" discovered in 2022.
I spent a lot of time in the early stages of the pandemic doing my utmost to try to understand the science behind it, and would dutifully try to give reputable researchers a voice in my reporting, but in the years that followed, a lot of forces have done a very good job of undermining their credibility - not least the scientists themselves.
After the first waves of the scourge swept through Hubei province in late 2019 and early 2020, and "conspiracy theorists" started pointing the finger at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, leading researchers made an unseemly scramble to control the narrative. At the same time, they were privately expressing doubts about the "scientific consensus" that the virus had crossed the species barrier naturally, probably through contaminated meat. It is at least worth exploring why they were so anxious to shut down the discussion and dismiss any suggestion that COVID-19 was manmade, even though those private discussions prove they had not initially ruled it out. Fauci is also reported to have made his own internal investigations to ascertain if any U.S.-backed research in Wuhan was involved.
It has to be said, however, that none of this proves they were trying to cover up what they knew unequivocally to be a lab leak, and nor does the famous letter published in Nature by Andersen et al in March 2020: at that stage, they couldn't be certain either way. It could easily just mean that they were worried that the widespread belief in a lab leak, which would better satisfy the public need to find something specific to blame, could jeopardise their reputations and their sources of government funding.
Still, the more salient unresolved issues for non-scientists (including myself) include:
The data showing that the Huanan market was an amplifying event and not an originating one;
The "coincidence" that the outbreak began in the very same city that hosted a powerful and heavily funded lab that just happened to be conducting research into coronaviruses;
The "coincidence" that the outbreak began only a year after the EcoHealth Alliance had unsuccessfully applied for DARPA funding for gain-of-function research involving the insertion of furin cleavage sites in coronaviruses;
The Wuhan Institute of Virology taking down its bat virus database;
The claim that Chinese authorities decided (in November 2019, a few weeks before the Huanan market outbreak) to change the way flu outbreaks were monitored. The decision not to test every new sample for signs of new viruses undermined the early warning mechanisms that were put in place since the first SARS outbreak in 2003. This at the very least suggested that they were anticipating a new SARS-like event and were desperate to use the seasonal flu surge to conceal it;
The failure to trace SARS-CoV-2 back to any infected wild animal, as they had done relatively quickly with the original SARS virus.
Many of us were on the hunt for fishiness because fishiness creates headlines. Fishiness satisfies our craving for evidence that the lying bastards are all lying to us. But no one can deny that the fishiness was there, stinking the place out from the beginning.
Still, Markolin does his level best to explain that the zoonotic hypothesis most consistently matches all the scientific data we have accumulated over the years, and I take his word for it. A preprint out this week also makes the case that it is possible for that infamous furin cleavage site to develop naturally. By contrast, the lab leak theory relies on anomaly hunting (and as anyone who has spent time in the JFK conspiracy rabbit hole knows, there are always anomalies everywhere). It also constantly shifts its goalposts and makes contradictory assertions. It has "predicted nothing about what subsequent studies would find or discover since 2020," Markolin claims.
I am particularly interested in Markolin's assessment of the shifting political conditions that boosted the fortunes of the lab leak crowd. The Trumpian right-wing narrative reframed the likes of DRASTIC and the ubiquitous Alina Chan as brave truth-tellers fighting back against oppressive government and media censorship that was all of a piece with Hunter Biden's laptop, the Twitter files and the election steal. The lab leak theory changed "from a low-status belief into a high-status one".
In actual fact, there was no censorship. Markolin's AI-assisted analysis of more than 11,000 COVID-19 origin news stories and 1,500 YouTube videos shows that "the lab leak theory has never not been the dominant theory in online news media, with the exception of the first quarter of 2020". Even left-leaning media like the Guardian, presumably in the interests of balance, have published more pro-lab leak pieces than pro-zoonosis ones, according to Markolin's analysis. Among the major mainstream news outlets, only Reuters skewed heavily in the direction of zoonosis.
It is clear that it is no longer fashionable to point out what the mainstream science says. What it says is that it is far more likely that COVID-19 was caused by the disruption of bat habitats and the commingling of bat species, which exposed us to thousands upon thousands of new viral recombinations, only one of which needed to be potent enough to kill 7 million people worldwide and cripple a dangerously interconnected global economy.
It should also be remembered: even if the preponderance of fishy evidence might lead one to lean towards the lab leak theory, the idea that it instead emerged from a Wuhan wet market should not in any way be considered an exoneration of China or the world of science. Wherever SARS-CoV-2 came from, the pandemic was still testament to a fundamental and destructive imbalance in humanity’s relationship with nature that is no more likely to be corrected now than it was in 2019.
