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Starts With A Bang!

The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it.

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Ask Ethan: Couldn’t COVID-19 have originated in a Chinese Lab?

In theory, scientists could’ve produced a deadly virus that accidentally infected lab workers. In practice, we know that didn’t happen.

22 min readApr 18, 2025

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For a very long time, after speaking with an enormous number of virologists and experts in related, adjacent fields — from up through to the present — I’ve been someone who’s asserted that we can be certain that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, definitively spilled over from a wet market in China into the human population. The other mainstream narrative, that the virus was through gain-of-function research which then infected lab workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is by an overwhelming suite of scientific evidence, all of which points towards the zoonotic spillover scenario.

You would think that going to the relevant experts and asking them , including why and how, would be the way to truly uncover the origins of the 21st century’s greatest global pandemic so far. But instead, the majority of Americans believe that the lab leak scenario — — has more merits, and that the “real” conspiracy is taking place among scientists who seek…

Starts With A Bang!
Starts With A Bang!

Published in Starts With A Bang!

The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it.

Ethan Siegel
Ethan Siegel

Written by Ethan Siegel

The Universe is: Expanding, cooling, and dark. It starts with a bang! #Cosmology Science writer, astrophysicist, science communicator & NASA columnist.

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