Almost as soon as the COVID-19 pandemic went global in early 2020, a public debate over its origins erupted. No one doubted then, or doubts now, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated in China before spreading all over the world. Yet since the first humans were infected, the mainstream scientific narrative has been that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was passed from an animal to humans at a wet market.
This view has not gone unchallenged: A small group of scientists and other public commentators — some, but not all, with political agendas — theorize that the virus originated in the wild before being captured and experimented upon in a biolab like the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology, from where it then leaked. Even after an article in Science Magazine last summer seemed to reaffirm the wet market theory, the lab leak notion has held on to its adherents. Major publications — including New York Magazine, the New Yorker and the MIT Technology Review — published stories on it.
