Theories aside, we still have a battle to fight

Even as we continue to battle the present pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 or Coronavirus, there is a growing interest in knowing its origins.  No one knows for sure where SARS-CoV-2, which causes the Covid-19 illness, came from. But there are two ideas. The first is the virus was harboured by an unknown animal, likely bats, where it mutated and picked up the ability to infect humans. Many pandemic viruses – Ebola, the 1918 flu –emerged this way. The other is that the virus was deliberately created in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research center near to where initial outbreaks were first detected in China.
The permanent uncertainty of SARS-CoV-2’s origins has made other explanations, no matter how complex, attractive. To fend off future pandemics, we need to know if it really leapt at us from a bat, as scientists largely led us to think, or leaked from a laboratory, a hypothesis that was never rejected and has seen its chances of testing true rise sufficiently to rescue it from dismissal as a ‘conspiracy theory’. The latter got fresh wind from the claim of two researchers, Angus Dalgleish of the UK and Birger Sorensen of Norway. Their work, they reportedly said, had revealed that this virus has no “credible natural ancestor" and is thus a likely lab creation, with a trail of reverse-engineered genetic pointers laid out sneakily as a red herring to mislead sleuths to a cave bat. The lab under suspicion is China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), located in the city where a wildlife and seafood market 12km away saw Covid’s first outbreak, the exact pattern of which Beijing withheld. Even without calls by countries like India and the US for an enquiry, British intelligence agencies calling the leak story “feasible" and China’s record of evasion over the question, all clues to its origin would’ve had to be pursued anyway for the sake of knowledge. But if lab-made virulence is indeed a big threat, defences would need to be erected urgently.
While much of the theories point to a Chinese cover-up of an accidental leak, or worse, an effort to develop bio-weapons, the evidence so far is only circumstantial. Even genomic clues can be unreliable. Some experts have drawn a parallel with early scepticism of Darwin’s big theory to remind us that nature is given to what we see as freak mutations. Evolution, they say, can take such weird twists that genomic data often acts as just another inkblot test: the belief in a designer could predispose an observer to spot telltale signs of one. All said, as of now, the balance of odds still favours a zoonotic jump over a laboratory leak. But, still, the world must investigate the charge. And stay on high alert.