Scientists as Mere Mortals

Over nearly forty years of writing columns, I have learned that there are few things readers like more than when a columnist eats humble pie and admits that he was wrong. Yet this week, I’m going to do the opposite and take a bow for having been right.

The impulse to do so came to me while reading a March 21 piece by Andrew Sullivan, “Why Did This Man Mislead Us? The disturbing tale of how the scientific establishment took aim at the lab leak theory.” Just after Purim of 2021, I felt confident enough that Covid-19 had its source in a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology to write, “The likeliest scenario for the emergence of SARS2 [Covid-19] is that it is the result of genetic engineering at the WIV, and that research was, at least in part by the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and carried out under minimal safety precautions.”

Needless to say, I did not reach that conclusion based on my own scientific expertise, of which I have none, but on the basis of excellent articles by Toronto neuroscientist Dr. Norman Doidge (“A Plague on Both Our Houses,” Tablet, Feb. 18, 2021) and former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade (“Origin of COVID — Following the Clues,” Medium, May 5, 2021).

Yet as late as October 2023, one could still read in the New York Times sentences such as: “No public evidence indicates that the Institute was storing any pathogen that could have become the coronavirus. Still, President Donald J. Trump and the Republicans of Capital Hill amplified the concerns.”

Those who dismissed the lab leak theory as a “fringe theory” (Washington Post) or a “conspiracy theory” (New York Times) did so largely on the basis of an article published March 17, 2020, in Nature Medicine titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” in which the four authors wrote, “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”