As the pandemic wore on, I suspect that effect would have lingered beyond the initial panic. At first, it might’ve been harder to decide that the virus was just something to live with if we knew simultaneously that it was something introduced to the world in error. And later, when the vaccines arrived, I suspect there might have been considerably less resistance to them, particularly on the American right, where anxiety and xenophobia might have trumped public-health skepticism and legacy anti-vaccine sentiment. Or at least moderated them. And swaths of the country might not have turned so swiftly against public-health authorities if they had been seen as fighting a pathogen arising from somewhere other than nature.
But the opposite counterfactual is just as illuminating. If there had been no question about the natural origin of the disease, with an intermediate host discovered as quickly as scientists identified the palm civet with the first SARS, would public-health skepticism have gained the foothold it has? Pandemics are long and hard, and offer ultimately ample opportunities for recrimination. But ambiguity contributes, as well, even when the known facts raise only a sliver of doubt.
The question and its unresolvability have mattered enormously for geopolitics, as well. Given the entanglement of American and Chinese virology research and funding, a definitive confirmation of a lab origin probably would not mean that responsibility lay in any simplistic way with China. But that isn’t to say the case wouldn’t have been made, probably in a variety of forms — calls for “reparations,” demands for global provision of free vaccines — that would only have contributed additional antagonism and resentment to the world stage, further polarizing the great-power landscape. (Though perhaps it would have had a salutary effect on global vaccination efforts, with the United States compelled to do much more to support rollout in the developing world for purposes of competitive vaccine diplomacy.) The disease and global response may well have accelerated our “new Cold War,” as Luce writes, but it is hard to imagine an alternate history where a known lab-leak origin didn’t move the world there much faster.
On the other hand, the natural logic of a confirmed zoonotic origin would probably have been to push nations of the world closer together into networks of collaboration and cooperation — to share research material and surveillance data for the purpose of better monitoring and preparation for future pandemics. Perhaps this proposition seems naïve, and I don’t want to suggest it might have led quickly to a cooperative scientific utopia — only that the direction of change would have most likely been toward more integration rather than less. After all, this is to some degree what happened in the wake of the initial outbreaks of SARS and MERS and the Ebola outbreaks of the past decade.
Instead, the geopolitics remain unsteady, which is to say, a bit jagged. The United States can weaponize a narrative about lab origin — as China hawks in both the Trump and Biden administrations have repeatedly done — without worrying too much about providing real proof or suffering concrete backlash. (Every time a new leak produces a new raft of headlines, I think, where’s the new evidence?) And China can stonewall origin investigations by citing sovereignty rights and a smoke screen story about the disease originating in frozen food shipped in from abroad without paying much of an international price for the intransigence or bad-faith argumentation, either. To this point, each has carried forward a gripe that needn’t be substantiated in order to be deployed.