Revenge of the Nerds

How amateur sleuths broke the Wuhan lab story

- By Rowan Jacobsen

For most of last year, the idea that the coronavirus pandemic could have been triggered by a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China, was largely dismissed as a racist conspiracy theory of the alt-right. The Washington Post in early 2020 accused Senator Tom Cotton of “fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts.” CNN jumped in with “How to debunk coronavirus conspiracy theories and misinformation from friends and family.” Most other mainstream outlets, from The New York Times (“fringe theory”) to NPR (“Scientists debunk lab accident theory”), were equally dismissive. (Newsweek and a few other media outlets were exceptions.)

Recently, however, the story has burst into the public discourse. President Joe Biden has demanded an investigation by U.S. intelligence. And the mainstream media, in an astonishing about-face, is treating the possibility with deadly seriousness.

The reason for the sudden shift in attitudes is clear: Over the weeks and months of the pandemic, the pileup of circumstantial evidence pointing to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) kept growing— until it became too substantial to ignore.