The Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis deserves relentless investigating

Did the culture war obscure the origins of the coronavirus?

A Wuhan lab.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

If three million people died from an industrial accident, what do you think the popular and press reactions would be?

I ask the question that way because it's entirely possible that this is what happened with COVID-19 — indeed, it might be the most-likely explanation of the origin of the pandemic. That's the conclusion that acclaimed science journalist Nicholas Wade came to recently in a detailed post on Medium, where he meticulously examines the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis, and finds the case for it plausible but unproven, while the case against it, and for a natural origin, is shockingly thin.

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Noah Millman

Noah Millman is a screenwriter and filmmaker, a political columnist and a critic. From 2012 through 2017 he was a senior editor and featured blogger at The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Politico, USA Today, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Policy, Modern Age, First Things, and the Jewish Review of Books, among other publications. Noah lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.