When a Good Scientist Is the Wrong Source
Six weeks ago, a reporter, Nicholas Wade, published what seemed to be a blockbuster story, one that, if true, would expose the greatest scandal in recent history. SARS-CoV-2, he wrote, or SARS2 for short, the virus that has driven the global COVID-19 pandemic, had likely been modified in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from which it then escaped into the wild. “Neither the natural emergence nor the lab escape hypothesis can yet be ruled out,” Wade wrote. “But it seems to me that proponents of lab escape can explain all the available facts about SARS2 considerably more easily than can those who favor natural emergence.”
Wade, a former New York Times science reporter, best known for promoting a genetic basis to racial hierarchies, first placed his piece at the self-publishing site Medium on May 2. The story really took wing when it was reposted three days later at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It was an extraordinary assertion, and as the saying goes, such claims need extraordinary proof.
Validation came from one of the most prominent biologists of the last
