Pandemic Revisionism, Part One: COVID-19 Origins

I have, for five years, studiously avoided writing anything about the origins of COVID-19. There are a few reasons for this. I’m not really qualified to comment. While I’m an expert on epidemiology who worked on COVID-19 during the pandemic, I’m not a virologist and much of the discussion is about viral RNA. It’s been 15 years since I spent any real time in a lab, so much of the more in-depth virological data is hard for me to properly assess. Not impossible, but hard.

I also genuinely don’t really care what started the pandemic. People are always shocked when they hear this, but to me it doesn’t matter that much. We know that wet markets should be better regulated and that globally laboratories should have strong oversight — these are both true regardless of what precisely caused the pandemic.

But a recent piece in the Guardian irritated me enough that I feel like I have to write about it. And since I’ve been thinking about writing a series on the current revisionist history of the pandemic, this might as well be the first piece. So let’s look at the origins of COVID-19 and why most of the current discourse is wildly off the mark.

Before we start, I should reiterate that I’m not the definitive word on this…