The zombie lab leak ‘theory’ sees human responsibility for COVID in all the wrong places

A leading scientific journal published not one but two peer-reviewed studies last week assembling a mountain of evidence on the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19. They point to a Chinese meat market as the place where, not once but at least twice, the novel coronavirus followed the path of countless other pathogens from our fellow animals into the human population it would soon devastate.

If this were a world where humans’ supposedly superior intelligence were in wider use, these studies would all but sound the death knell for the “theory” that the virus was cooked up in a Chinese laboratory, which is not really a theory at all. But here in the real, COVID-ravaged world, the conspiratorial conjecture will continue ad nauseam, a hypothetical zombie that no army of facts can slay.

The determination to imbue the virus’ origins with human agency curiously coexists with our will to ignore our role in its perpetuation, rip off our masks, insist on our personal freedom to forgo a pinprick in the arm, and eagerly crowd into bars and airports. Even as we can’t seem to accept any amount of evidence that the advent of the virus was just another dumb accident of nature, we behave as if its endless parade through our ranks is a natural disaster beyond our power to mitigate with a modicum of caution.

The studies published in the journal Science last week affirm long-standing indications that SARS-CoV-2 entered the population the way of nearly every other such contagion that has been traced: from another species. That’s how we got the first SARS coronavirus, influenza and of course our latest epidemic, monkeypox, which is not only named for an animal but believed to originate in one — though, oddly enough, it may be a squirrel.

Mapping the earliest known cases of COVID across time and space, the newly published papers show they radiated from Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which happens to lie more than nine miles and across the Yangtze River from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the epicenter of much of the lab leak theorizing. Moreover, the positive samples from the market, which came under suspicion in the early days of the outbreak, tended to come from the section selling a menagerie of live mammals kept in close and less-than-immaculate quarters, including hog badgers, raccoon dogs and a species of invasive swamp rodents more familiar to Californians, nutria.

These were ideal conditions for the virus to jump from one of those animals — likely an intermediate host carrying an infection from a bat — to a human. In fact, the scientists’ study of the early lineages of the virus shows that animals likely infected people at the market twice or more in late 2019.

It’s worth noting that the latest studies contradict the talking points of the Chinese government, which has been pushing unlikely notions that the pandemic originated on another continent. Nor are the papers the work of partisans for one theory or another. University of Arizona professor Michael Worobey, an author of one of them, also signed on to a letter to Science last year that helped prompt widespread reconsideration of the possibility that the virus came from a lab.

Not that we should expect all that to dissipate in the face of compelling evidence. As another author of the paper, University of Saskatchewan virologist Angela Rasmussen, put it last week, “already the bad faith takes are rolling in from people with a vested interest in a lab origin.” Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, like many on the right an avid proponent of the lab leak story, has said he will make it the focus of a congressional investigation if Republicans win the midterm elections this fall.

Truth is not the only victim of such virulent conspiracy-mongering. The adoption of the hypothesis at the highest levels of the Trump administration was accompanied by a surge of anti-Asian-American hatred and violence in California and across the country.

Faith in a malevolent foreign source of the plague is one way of absolving our leaders and ourselves of responsibility, an ulterior motive more powerful than any gathering of facts.

Anyone who wants to attribute the pandemic to actual human causes could look to our penetration of every corner of the wilderness, not to mention our appetite for catching and eating a good portion thereof. There’s also our determination to do as little as possible about it once those encounters unleash new and dangerous diseases.

COVID, for instance, is still killing people in Sacramento County daily and an average of more than 40 Californians and 400 Americans every day. For this, oddly enough, we would rather blame eventualities of nature such as new viral variants than our willing assistance in their transmission and evolution.

So the nation’s airlines and many of their passengers cheered the lifting of a federal mask mandate for air travel in the spring, followed by a foreboding 50% spike in infections among Transportation Security Administration employees. As Los Angeles County considered and then retreated from reinstating a mask mandate last week, several of its cities preemptively vowed to defy it. As for vaccine mandates, which would be more effective than masks, they have been dropped by California legislators, fought by Gov. Gavin Newsom, and blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Americans who want to find the people who did this to us don’t have to look across the Pacific. We just have to look around.