[Intelligencer] On a Thursday morning in September, members of The Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission gathered for a virtual press conference to announce the findings of their two-year investigation into all things pandemic related. Leading it was Jeffrey Sachs, the world-renowned economist who chaired the commission. After a short opening statement, he dove into a summary of the group’s 57-page final report, starting at as natural a place as any: the beginning."We do not know where SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused this pandemic, came from. Some scientists surmise that it came from a marketplace. Many scientists are worried that it came out of a laboratory through work that was underway on SARS-like viruses," Sachs said. "Both hypotheses are viable. Neither has been disproved."
To most people watching, Sachs’s remark was a simple statement of fact. Three years after the earliest reports of COVID-19, few scientists will entirely rule out either theory absent conclusive evidence, which may be impossible to find given China’s initial cover-up. But the mere mention of origins irritated a number of people because, exactly one year earlier, Sachs had unilaterally disbanded a task force within The Lancet commission dedicated to studying COVID’s origins, accusing members of hiding what he believed were conflicts of interest — the nature of their research before the pandemic and their connections to the Wuhan research institute many suspect to have accidentally leaked the virus.
"I’m extraordinarily glad I did that because between then and now we’ve really been able to peek behind the curtain at a lot of what happened in the early days of this pandemic, and it’s all very, very inappropriate," Sachs told me via Zoom. His frustration was still evident.
In the early days of the pandemic, Sachs believed the prevailing natural-origin theory and denounced the dissenting lab-leak theory as "reckless and dangerous." Over the next two years, though, he did an about-face and in the process found himself at the center of the most contentious, vitriolic scientific debate of the century.
Not long ago, people who suggested that researchers might have accidentally unleashed the virus were written off as kooks or China hawks, which confined much of the early public discussion of the lab-leak theory to the fun houses of the far right. Now the theory is getting increasing consideration. "In some ways, it’s quite similar to the Hunter Biden laptop situation," said Alina Chan, scientific adviser to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "Because the central or liberal media refused to cover it properly, it gave free rein to all of the right-wing media to report in the most polarizing, exaggerated way possible and inflame tensions."