When COVID-19 broke out, it was a US election year and that meant a lot of common sense gave way to politics. Democrats charged that then-President Trump was putting lives at risk by telling FDA to fast-track a vaccine, after insisting that closing airports to China was racist and xenophobic because the World Health Organisation had not declared a pandemic. Government insiders spread the word to debunk concerns about a nearby wet market in Wuhan and the safety of its two labs even though an employee had been convicted of selling lab animals in that wet market. China scrubbed its coronavirus database out of existence to outsiders. 

In hindsight, we know politics made a lot go wrong. WHO was not declaring a pandemic because they were giving an irrational amount of weight to the wishes of the Chinese government, Democrats took credit for the vaccine after President Biden won, and then Republicans weirdly ended 25 years of overwhelming dominance by the left there. Career employees inside government and their allies were exposed as protecting the Chinese government from any scrutiny.

No one argued the Chinese did it on purpose but even though WHO officially shielded them, the bulk of the entire world does blame China for it. You just can't take a communist dictator with nuclear weapons to court. A lab leak had only circumstantial evidence but an animal origin always had merit. The Chinese were bringing bats from 1,000 miles away with new strains of coronavirus for gain-of-function tests. There is nothing wrong with gain-of-function research, except everyone who knows China understands their Biosafety level ratings are not like the US. Employees are often paranoid, disgruntled, and underpaid. Their methods are sloppy. The BSL rating is only valid when a Party official is doing a scheduled inspection.



All that meant the world should have taken a critical look at China and demanded an outside investigation that China would not have allowed. Instead, the government has distracted people by bouncing from crisis to crisis.

Science marches on and scientists are contrarian enough that even if those in power make it dangerous to speak up, over time research will happen. A new paper in Cell argues that the source of SARS-CoV-2 was wildlife sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale market in Wuhan. The data were viral genomes from early COVID-19 patients and 800 samples collected in and near that wet market early in 2020. By January of 2020, denials aside, there was so much chatter about a "Wuhan Flu" that the Chinese government was arresting people who talked about it too much. Conveniently, some died in police custody. The Chinese CDC sent in a team to take samples.

Three years later, the Chinese government published the results of their metatranscriptomic sequencing in Nature but oddly didn't state the animal species found in the data. They made the data open, yet incomplete. That's where other scientists converge on the truth. The new paper found raccoon dogs and civet cats with traces of SARS-CoV-2 via "DNA and RNA ghosts" the Chinese had not expunged from the results, including in stalls where the deadly coronavirus was found.

No one on this side of the Robert F Kennedy Jr 'vaccines-cellphones-GMOs are a vast right wing conspiracy' crackpot tribe thinks there was an intentional lab leak. Error, sure, given their sloppy methods. A misanthropic researcher, well, that had already happened there so possibly. But denial that it originated in Wuhan, or simply sprang up in a miracle of spontaneous generation, was the biggest conspiracy of all. It just happens to be one that a whole lot of people, including in science academia, embraced.