Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling

Archived version to bypass paywall

https://web.archive.org/web/20210625124427/https://www.nytim...

In fairness, it is an opinion piece. I strongly suspect that - on this topic more than most others - "truth" is a Rorschach test, and different people will come away with different conclusions. That said, Zeynep Tufecki has an excellent track record of being right (she was way ahead of the curve on airborne), and if you're going to read one thing on Covid origins, this is probably the one.

Another really fascinating piece of background, Jon Cohen's 2000 piece on the origins of AIDS: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/10/the-hun...

The tl;dr is that there was a popular book (The River) that pushed contaminated oral polio vaccine as an origin story, a lot of people believed it at the time, but that story pretty much fell apart as more detail (slowly) came in on transmission from primates.

But I thought le evil orange man said it came from a lab, and therefore it must be false and debunked? That’s what The Washington Post told me to think last year.

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.” - 1984

The “orange man” as trump is called in the comment latched onto various utter speculations and tried to use them to absolve any responsibility to our poor preparation and response to the virus. And used it more to further a racist culture war than doing anything constructive. So yes, at a time when it was pure speculation used for a harmful agenda, the “orange man” was grossly irresponsible. And he acted like if it was true we could go back to normal and stop quarantining.

But sure, when lurching from speculation to speculation in a desperate attempt to shift blame and go back to normal, throwing random unfounded ideas like ingesting bleach, hydroxychloroquine, and lab leaks, then sometime the broken clock is right.

Edit: Policy needs to be data driven, not driven by complete speculation. Later it doesn’t matter what comes out if at the time the “theory” policies were based on were unfounded speculation. That is grossly negligent. Timing matters. And all of these matters are still speculation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/21/hydroxych...