Debating Covid’s Origins: A Lab or a Market?

To the Editor:

Re “Why Covid Probably Started in a Lab,” by Alina Chan (Opinion guest essay, June 9):

Dr. Chan makes a case for a laboratory origin of Covid-19. Richly illustrated with animated graphics online, the text proposes five main arguments to accuse a team led by Dr. Shi Zhengli, a scientist based in Wuhan, China, of having created the virus causing Covid in her lab, letting it leak, and hiding information linking the pandemic’s origin to her work. Dr. Chan further implied that Dr. Shi’s collaborators could also be hiding incriminating evidence.

These accusations are very serious, yet the case made by Dr. Chan rests entirely on speculation. Critical facts are ignored, such as the presence of live wild animals involved in the emergence of SARS in the market where many of the first people known to have gotten Covid worked or shopped. In my view, proper scientific analyses, which a majority of experts agree support a natural origin, are misrepresented or inappropriately dismissed by Dr. Chan.

While the origin of the pandemic is still not known with certainty, Dr. Chan has identified her culprits without any actual evidence.

Florence Débarre
Paris
The writer, an evolutionary biologist, is a senior researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research.

To the Editor:

Based on the comments in response to this well-presented and compelling article, it appears that many still insist on putting their heads in the sand about the source of the Covid pandemic. They insist the article does not “prove” the origin of the pandemic to be the lab in Wuhan.

However, it should be noted that the headline of the article includes the word “probably,” which is probably as close as we will ever get to knowing the source of the pandemic, because the Chinese government certainly will never come clean about it if it is in any way at fault.