The “Lab Leak”: It’s Not Enough to Say Accidents Happen

Disasters evoke a search for who to blame. Mishandled disasters make that search vital for anyone whose actions or inactions may have amplified the catastrophe’s damage. As the official United States COVID death toll reaches 600,000, those two dynamics have revitalized a claim first made early in the pandemic: that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease, was released, possibly as an engineered organism, in a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

This “lab-leak” hypothesis was first promoted in 2020, often as a deflection of criticism of Trump’s and other Republicans’ failures in the face of the American epidemic. If Chinese