Ask Ethan: Couldn’t COVID-19 have originated in a Chinese Lab? | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Apr, 2025

In theory, scientists could’ve produced a deadly virus that accidentally infected lab workers. In practice, we know that didn’t happen.

For a very long time, after speaking with an enormous number of virologists and experts in related, adjacent fields — from the pandemic’s early days up through to the present — I’ve been someone who’s asserted that we can be certain that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, definitively spilled over from a wet market in China into the human population. The other mainstream narrative, that the virus was created in a Chinese laboratory through gain-of-function research which then infected lab workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is undermined and refuted by an overwhelming suite of scientific evidence, all of which points towards the zoonotic spillover scenario.

You would think that going to the relevant experts and asking them what the scientific evidence supports, including why and how, would be the way to truly uncover the origins of the 21st century’s greatest global pandemic so far. But instead, the majority of Americans believe that the lab leak scenario — itself a conspiracy theory — has more merits, and that the “real” conspiracy is taking place among scientists who seek…