And, every time I have to mention the lab leak conspiracy theory, there are a few things that go along with this that drive everyone up the wall, including me.
Disease existed for thousands of years before laboratories existed. But a lot of people forget about that when they hear an exciting dramatic story about a virus somehow cooked up in a lab.
Important Context “I Believe It”: Bhattacharya Pushes Lab Leak Conspiracy At Contentious NIH Town Hall As Staffers Walk Out Dozens of staffers walked out when NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya promoted the unproven COVID origins story; others protested research cuts. Walker Bragman May 19, 2025 “It’s nice to have free speech,” Bhattacharya commented amid the clapping before continuing on to state, “If it’s true that we sponsored research that caused the pandemic—and if you look at polls of the American people, that’s what most people believe, and I’ve looked at the scientific evidence and I believe it—what we have to do is make sure that we don’t engage in research that is any risk…to human populations.”
The new Trump administration head of the NIH has been playing to the truther base, and now die-hards from the lab leak truthing cult have been hired at the NIH.
Important Context Promoters of Unproven COVID Lab Leak Narratives Join NIH Virologists expressed concern over under-qualified ideologues joining Director Bhattacharya. Walker Bragman Jul 15, 2025 Bryce Nickels, PhD, Edward Hammond, and Alex Washburne, PhD, are all vocal proponents of the narrative that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 was developed in and leaked from a laboratory. All have ties to a controversial group called Biosafety Now, which is dedicated to promoting the dubious origin story, and opposing so-called “gain-of-function” research—manipulation of viruses to understand their evolution, predict potential outbreaks, and even develop treatments—which they blame for causing the pandemic.
The thing I can explain is that there is a coherent narrative for why the same people who push “the lab leak theory” also are the same people who say covid is no big deal or who are even pandemic deniers. On the surface that sounds like it couldn’t make sense. But on that’s because lab leak theory, for them, is pandemic denial. I finally wrote an explainer on how lab leak truthers are pandemic deniers last year. Also spoiler alert, lab leak truthers are also anti-vaxxers! Because of course they are! Also spoiler alert, it’s anti-semitic too!
It really does makes sense when you realize that when Jay Bhattacharya says “research that caused the pandemic” he doesn’t necessarily mean what you think he means. Or at least statements like that could be a — “derive what you want and fit it into your own belief” — sort of situation. The right-wing anti-vax milieu has a whole narrative story around this where the lab didn’t actually leak a “real” virus, they leaked something bogus that was meant to be an excuse to give people vaccines, which the right-wing anti-vax conspiracy theory believers think is the grand weapon and that some evil cabal controlling governments wants to harm people with it. So when the public health contrarians say that covid has been “weaponized” they don’t necessarily mean a virus itself. You can never be sure exactly what they mean, because a lot of lab leak truthers believe different things. And they usually believe something different than people outside that info cocoon would expect.
The stranger part is that there are people broadly on the left who buy into the whole lab leak thing, and maybe some of them believe lockdown revisionist bullshit, maybe some of them are covid minimizers, and maybe some of them really are on the horseshoe and buying into some Qanon MAGA stuff. I think a lot of people do come from a place of believing it to be the product of government theory but actually don’t realize this “anti-government” thing is about blaming a supposed Jewish cabal, and in the case of covid dates back to the very start of the pandemic.
To the extent I’ve seen people on the left approach the topic they seem to come from a position where they feel that labs are problematic generally, even if people don’t even have that well articulated in their minds. And that much is obvious because at least the right-wingers have a story that makes sense with internal logic, however bonkers and wrong it is. To think that pandemic viral diseases are more likely to be cooked up in labs than to happen by chance doesn’t quite make sense at all. You would have to start from a place where you assume scientific medical laboratories have existed at least as far back as Australopithecus or something.
Do people think the Roman physician Galen cooked up the Antonine plague? It is believed to have been caused by smallpox or measles. Perhaps someone did so in a lab under orders and funding from Emperor Antoninus Pius? I guess it’s easy these days to believe the leader of an empire will deliberately have their own population get measles and even wittingly tank the economy of said empire. Nero fiddling while Rome burned, tariffs tanking businesses and reckless unhygienic people running the public health system and whatnot. Sure, makes sense. However the Antonine plague was happening in the year 165 AD. Does anyone think there was some medical lab involved with the Justinianic plague halfway through the 6th century Byzantine Empire? That was bubonic plague, does The Black Death just get a pass then from the “likely to have come from a lab” assumption? I’ve read that hospitals had become common by the Byzantine era, and I’ve seen it called a “second medical revolution” in that time period. But some of the hospitals after that, in the Dark Ages, you probably wouldn’t want to get admitted to them. There were also laboratories hundreds of years ago, but nobody was looking at viruses under microscopes back then. So how could anyone think they could’ve been engineering viruses. And out of what? Why do people think viruses would come from somewhere “artificial” but not just exist on their own in nature anyway?
Do they also think the bird flu panzootic was made in some bird’s nest turned laboratory somewhere up in some tree? That sounds absurd, but it’s really absurd to think that anyone has been creating diseases in laboratories and that this is more likely to be the case than diseases naturally occurring by happenstance. This assumption is like some perverse Just World Fallacy bias taking a weird turn. Eugenics is real, and a lot of the people pushing lab leak theory are actually on board with that. But it doesn’t mean every disease was likely created as a bioweapon. But the more disturbing possibility that like other things, this could be a warped Accusation in a Mirror, and what people behind the pushing of these narratives really intend is to make cooked up viruses that harm people a reality, created and implemented by dark money ghouls, and cheered on by the right-wing. These people do want public health, but they want the kind that is preoccupied with promoting discredited eugenics ideas.