"And so then any time a new snippet of evidence comes along that that seems odd. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine. "As time progresses, the fact that China doesn't allow any substantive investigation into the origins of it, people are going to naturally begin to wonder why," said Dr. president Donald Trump and other Republicans, but dismissed by many as a conspiracy theory.īut, without clear evidence of a natural origin, or what scientists call "zoonotic spillover" from an animal host, the idea hasn't gone away. It was floated shortly after the pandemic emerged, and championed by then U.S. The lab-leak theory postulates that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which does work with coronaviruses, may have been studying or even modifying such viruses to better understand them, and that a lab accident may have allowed the virus to escape. "I have to remind everybody and myself, too, that, you know, we're still far from a conclusive proof either way," said Deigin. What has changed is calls from scientists in the field, the Biden administration, and others to investigate it properly - because even the head of the World Health Organization says that hasn't happened yet. To be clear, the so-called Wuhan lab-leak theory isn't back in the news because any major piece of evidence has been uncovered to give it credence. He says he, too, initially believed what appeared to be the general scientific consensus, that the virus behind COVID-19 originated naturally through human contact with an infected animal in Wuhan, China, "because that's how viral outbreaks usually happen."īut, Deigin said, after he delved into the competing theory, "it became very clear that this is not a crazy hypothesis, not a crazy conspiracy theory."
"When I just put it out, I was ridiculed and attacked as a crackpot, a crazy guy who doesn't know what he's talking about," Deigin said from Moscow.ĭuring the pandemic, Deigin has been independently researching the origins of the virus online and sharing information on social media with a loosely formed group of self-proclaimed "Twitter detectives." For Canadian biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin, whose 16,000-word essay last April provided one of the first detailed arguments that the COVID-19 virus could have escaped from a Chinese lab, the recent traction gained by such a theory provides a measure of satisfaction.