The Lab-Leak Theory Was a Victim of Left-Wing Culture Wars

T he Wall Street Journal revealed on Sunday that the U.S. Department of Energy has joined the FBI in concluding that the virus that exploded out of China in early 2020, inaugurating the worst global public-health crisis in a century and taking millions of lives with it, “most likely” originated in a Chinese virology lab. Other investigatory bodies looking into the virus’s origins don’t yet all agree, and the Energy Department added the caveat that it had “low confidence” in its own assessment. But “low confidence” is more than no confidence. Even this modest dispensation represents an indictment of the expert classes, who wielded all the social pressure at their disposal to cajole the nation into dismissing the lab-leak theory early and with prejudice.

Those who lent credence to the theory and were subjected to the dominant culture’s bottomless capacity for condescension as a result will be tempted to take a victory lap. And, you know what? They should! The story of the theory’s rise, fall, and rise again is a story of how too many abused their positions of authority to wage a conflict over cultural values under the guise of dispassionate empiricism. Anathematizing the lab-leak hypothesis was just the latest avenue through which they could impeach political actors they didn’t like.

Senator Tom Cotton was among the earliest prominent figures to wonder aloud whether a unique coronavirus conspicuously adapted to infect humans had escaped containment in a country where laboratory leaks that sicken and kill are not unheard of and where “laboratory biosafety” was, until recently, an obscure concept. Cotton’s curiosity was handled by the arbiters of American discourse as a menace more dangerous than the virus itself.

Cotton was attacked in the Washington Post for his credulous embrace of a “fringe” “conspiracy theory.” Figures in superficially authoritative positions alleged that his “irresponsible” “fear-mongering” rendered him the functional equivalent of Cold War–era dupes who witlessly propagated the KGB’s falsehoods only to advance their parochial ideological objectives. These brushback pitches were informed by what passed for “the science,” as virologists and public-health experts rallied around the notion that the lab-leak theory impeded global efforts to contain the disease’s spread. What’s more, anyone who lent credence to the theory was labeled an accomplice to the campaign of “online bullying of scientists and anti-Asian harassment” that was somehow licensed by asking the wrong questions.

The lab-leak hypothesis was never wholly unsupported by evidence. But as former New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil Jr. wrote on Medium in early 2021, in discussing the judgment calls his paper and other heavyweight outlets had made when putting their thumbs on the scales against the lab-leak theory, the mainstream consensus ensured that the theory was relegated to the fringes, where it would only be “championed by the folks who brought us Pizzagate, the Plandemic, Kung Flu, Q-Anon, Stop the Steal, and the January 6 Capitol invasion.” Thus, the presumed derangement of the lab-leak theory’s proponents became a self-reinforcing proposition. After all, only the crazies would touch it. You could be forgiven for concluding that was an intended consequence of all this gatekeeping.

In May 2021, the Wall Street Journal revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies had evidence indicating that the lab-leak theory was no paranoid fantasy. The Journal’s revelations about the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s previously undisclosed patient zeros did not, however, compel those who’d bludgeoned into silence anyone questioning China’s inviolable commitment to “laboratory biosafety” to re-examine their priors. Instead, it prompted them to fine-tune their arguments, which subsequently went from being centered on their supreme scientific confidence to being centered on their indisputable cultural sophistication.

Media outlets that had once definitively debunked the lab-leak theory innovated a new journalistic genre: the un-debunking. And yet, the explicit intention behind these retrospectives was to indemnify those who’d collaborated in the pressure campaign against the theory’s proponents — or, at least, to validate their good intentions. “Were news reports diminishing or disregarding the lab-leak theory actually ‘wrong’ at the time,” asked the very same Washington Post that had savaged Senator Cotton, “or did they in fact accurately reflect the limited knowledge and expert opinion about it?” You won’t be surprised by how the paper answered its own question.

In February 2021, Facebook lifted an arbitrary ban it had imposed on posts that included “false claims about Covid-19,” including the notion that the virus was “man-made or manufactured.” The decision was attributed to the “evolving nature of the pandemic,” but the pandemic had not actually evolved at all. What had evolved was the conventional wisdom. At the same time, Facebook reportedly tightened the regime restricting users’ ability to post “content that has been rated false,” or at least has yet to be deemed true. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the biases shared by those who “rate” relative factuality might extend beyond epidemiology. And in Facebook’s defense, ABC News absent-mindedly admitted, “the claims [sic] that the virus came from the lab was one often pushed by former President Donald Trump, though he never provided evidence.” Enough said.

In what must have been a painful concession in September 2021, science historian Naomi Oreskes admitted that the “lab-leak theory is plausible.” But even so, she qualified her mea culpa by calling “some of the people promoting the claim” — and Donald Trump, in particular — “irrational.” “We all judge messages by the messenger,” this distinguished voice in the field of science journalism let slip. Even the center-left columnist Jonathan Chait, who had been brave enough to buck the social pressures culminating in a consensus around the virtue of censorship, justified his colleagues’ prejudicial impulses after the fact, writing that the “idiotic conformity of the right’s pseudo-journalistic apparatus” had essentially incepted in the Left an equal and opposite reaction to its “propaganda.”

The Energy Department’s conclusions about the virus’s origins are occasioning even more admissions against the Left’s interest. Author and CNN contributor Jill Filipovic rationalized the conduct of her ideological allies by noting that Donald Trump’s bigotries “put liberals understandably on the defense against any theory that seemed to blame China for Covid.” MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan stated this proposition with even more self-confidence. “The simple reason why so many people weren’t keen to discuss the ‘lab leak’ theory is because it was originally conflated by the right with ‘Chinese bioweapon’ conspiracies and continues to be conflated by the right with anti-Fauci conspiracies,” he wrote. “Blame the conspiracy theorists.”

What Hasan is missing is that he is the conspiracy theorist here. Advocates of the lab-leak theory’s suppression constructed an elaborate narrative in which the propagators of this thesis were actively radicalizing their impressionable audiences. They convinced themselves that even discussing the possibility that the theory might be true had the power to destabilize the global geopolitical environment and produce an army of potentially violent racists. You don’t often see genuine scholars indulge the hyperventilating apoplexy to which those who tried to throttle the nascent lab-leak theory in its crib so often appealed. But you do frequently see those who prosecute the culture wars indulge it — and the prosecution of the culture wars is all this enterprise ever was.