I haven’t tweeted much about the origins of covid question because what do I know?
But it seems that short of some unlikely definitive proof it came from a lab (an admission by someone who was there, the announcement of stored samples there matching the SARS-CoV-2 genome), we’re never going to know for sure and this will always keep the lab theory alive.
Even if it’s wrong. Or unlikely.
But really, it shouldn’t matter. Or, put another way, it only matters for political reasons, not public health ones.
It’s possible, as is a natural origin. So we ought to do what we can to make labs more secure *and* natural emergences easier to identify and isolate *and* limit genetic engineering to experimentally make more virulent pathogens *and* improve international pandemic coordination.
We don’t need to wait for proof that may never come. We don’t need to imagine that if it emerged one way it couldn’t have emerged another way.
There may be reasons to try to find out (however skeptical I am that we will ever know for sure) but the reasons most people care is political.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
