IT'S JUST SINOPHOBIA:

A decade ago, I traced a deadly epidemic back to a politically explosive source. It was the fall of 2010, and Haiti was reeling from a massive cholera epidemic. Rumors flew that the outbreak was caused by United Nations peacekeepers. Some variations on these rumors were extremely far-fetched.1 Many were politically motivated. But within the rumors was a testable hypothesis: that a specific group of U.N. soldiers at a specific base had introduced the disease in a specific way--by dumping infected sewage into the country's main river system.

Now I could have written a story based on the rumors alone. I could have done a meta-analysis over whether we were "allowed" to have the debate over cholera's origins at all. But I was a journalist living in Port-au-Prince. So I went to the base -- a riverside outpost of recently arrived soldiers from Nepal -- and found the first hard evidence implicating the U.N. That first story kicked off years of research by myself, epidemiologists, and others. It was not easy: The U.N. and its partners in the U.S. government covered up and fought us every inch of the way. But in the end, we established an evidentiary timeline showing when, where, and as close as we could get to how the U.N. introduced cholera to Haiti. Six years later, I extracted a grudging admission from the U.N. Secretary-General.

Given that experience, you might think I'd have been among the first to buy into the allegations of the "lab leak" origin of COVID-19. Indeed, I've heard through the grapevine that some of my old Haiti cholera crew are buying the hype. But I'm not. At least not yet. That is because the lab leak is still missing the key element of the U.N. cholera story that made it more than just a bunch of rumors: an actual, coherent theory of the case that could be refuted or confirmed.

When you peel back the label, it seems "lab leak" is a jaunty alliteration that papers over a variety of wildly different, often mutually exclusive, ideas. It isn't a theory but a bundle of loose hypotheses that contradict each another on basic facts: the nature of the virus in question, the timeline of introduction -- even the identity of the lab at which the alleged leak occurred.

Now, even those contradictions in and of themselves are not necessarily disqualifying. Science famously evolves, and multiple competing ideas can exist at once. But I can't help but notice that whenever one of these myriad "theories" gains cultural currency, even proponents of directly contradicted hypotheses claim vindication. It is as if they don't actually care what happened, so long as it affirms their notions of who was wrong and whom the guilty party should be. It's maddening to watch--especially as someone who thinks that finding the origins of an epidemic is important.

After all this time, there's no evidence any lab in the world had the SARS-CoV-2 virus or any virus that could have been tweaked to make SARS-Cov-2 prior to the pandemic. 

That's the ground truth from which every discussion of the origins of the virus must proceed. A lab can't leak what it hasn't got. 

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