The editors of the Wall Street Journal weigh in on the “Wuhan Lab theory”, the notion that the virus spread from a biosafety lab in Wuhan, China outside the lab to Wuhan and from there to the entire world:
The evidence is clear that the Chinese Communist Party covered up for weeks the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, but what we don’t know is why. One emerging theory is that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab. Beijing denies it, but the world deserves a full accounting of what China knew and when.
President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have both said in recent days that they’ve seen evidence the coronavirus did come from a Wuhan lab. Mr. Trump said it appears to be an accidental release. If they don’t want the issue to be dismissed as an anti-China campaign ploy, they should make the evidence public.
Scientists think the virus was carried naturally in horseshoe bats and jumped to humans for the first time in Wuhan late last year. The question is: Under what circumstances did that happen? It could have happened at the city’s wet market, though that theory is complicated by a changing timeline and the fact that the bats don’t appear to have been sold there.
It could also have jumped from bats to another animal like a pangolin before infecting a person, or patient zero could have encountered a bat in the wild. The “lab theory†isn’t that it was a bioweapon gone wrong. It’s that a lab worker was inadvertently infected at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) or Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, both of which are located near the first reported cases.
I have no idea whether COVID-19’s Patient Zero was a lab worker in Wuhan or not and, honestly, I don’t really care. I don’t believe that SARS-CoV-2 is an escaped bioweapon. It has practically no characteristic of a good bioweapon. If it’s a bioweapon it’s the world’s worst. It makes a darned good terror weapon, however, as we have learned.
Every shred of evidence we have right now suggests that the virus did originate in China has practically every pandemic of the last four centuries has. And that the Chinese authorities lied about it and covered up which can be as well explained by hypersensitivity as by malice. That China presents a repeated risk of contagion and its leaders will lie about the risks, at least as long as the Chinese Communist Party as in charge, are more than enough reason to adopt strenuous measures to mitigate the risks that presents.
The financial risk is in the trillions of dollars, more than any conceivable benefit of trade with China, and in the millions of lives which is enough to point to the sort of mitigation that is needed.
