In the summer of 2021, when I was still a ritualistic viewer of Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show,” I remember a particularly striking conversation Colbert had with Jon Stewart about COVID. Stewart had been relatively removed from the public spotlight for several years since he left “The Daily Show” in 2015, and this interview was one of his rare ventures into mainstream media. In this interview, it seemed to me at the time that Stewart had had perhaps too much time to himself, because as soon as Colbert brought up the pandemic, Stewart began a rant endorsing the lab leak theory that sounded eerily similar to the crazed right-wing conspiracists I had learned to quickly write off. However, now that I was hearing those things coming from Jon Stewart, it felt at least a bit more acceptable to question the true origins of the pandemic. To be clear, my response at the time watching this interview, and judging from their hesitant applause, the response of many in Colbert’s audience, was certainly one of skepticism and discomfort. But in this moment, there was at least a sense of intrusion into the narrative about COVID’s origins, which I had comfortably and unreservedly accepted.
With several years of hindsight, I think it is safe to say that the questions Stewart raised about the cause of the pandemic were definitely warranted. Since 2021, more and more information and inside expertise have been revealed that challenge the certainty with which I, and many others, were told that COVID originated from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China. In 2023, the FBI and Department of Energy both officially asserted, albeit with “low confidence,” that the pandemic most likely originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Independent scientists, too, have argued that a lab leak probably explains the emergence of COVID. Internal, recently uncovered assessments of COVID’s origins by the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) that were authored in 2020 but never published, reveal that the BND was 85-90% confident that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was responsible for a leak that initiated the global pandemic. There have also been recent revelations that, since the very beginning of the pandemic, many scientists had questions about the cause of COVID that they decided not to share. In some cases, reporters were actively misled by scientists and institutions alike in an attempt to “throw them off track” of the possibility of a lab leak.
Some people still assert that any talk of a lab leak which does not conform to the initial narrative, that such a leak could never have been possible, should be dismissed out of hand. However, this perspective reveals a bizarre and uncritical deference to a supposed truth that has been, in many ways, heavily manufactured and manipulated since the very beginning of the pandemic. There is the constant concern that conspiracy theorists may capitalize on any sense of scientific uncertainty and take the opportunity to concoct stories that ultimately distract from the most important question — namely, how to deal with the crisis. The Trump administration recently replaced federal websites on how to get tested, vaccinated, and remain protected from COVID with a page titled “Lab Leak: The True Origins of COVID.” Their completely confident assertion that COVID must have arisen in the Wuhan laboratory is definitely unfounded. There are still many conflicting scientific accounts and conclusions about the pandemic’s origin, and it would seem ill-advised to assert that we can say with any strong certainty how COVID arose. However, it is also a mistake to instinctively dismiss the lab leak theory. There are often times when the narratives we take for granted, and are espoused by those in whom we place authority, turn out to be distorted, misleading, or even completely false themselves.
In fact, when it comes to COVID, narratives that we often accept as comprehensive and uncontroversial often miss the most important and fundamental ways that we should understand this pandemic and the potential emergence of others like it. Whether people think of the pandemic crisis as emerging due to incompetence and unpreparedness on the part of governments and health agencies or even if they go slightly further back and highlight COVID’s specific origins (either as a lab leak or in the Wuhan wet market), the deeper roots of the crisis might be missing.
In a recent book called “Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19,” the evolutionary epidemiologist Rob Wallace, along with many of his colleagues, describes how our entire system of agricultural production lays the perfect conditions for pandemics to emerge and spread across the world. Interestingly, our modern world is not more conducive to worldwide pandemics merely because of global systems of trade that allow pathogens to reach places more rapidly than ever before. Rather, it is the very specific methods of production through which modern industrial agribusiness operates that render viruses, potentially those like COVID, more likely to enter human circulation.
Wallace and his colleagues write that such industries, constantly driving to expand their economic and geographical domain, encroach upon wildlife that may carry harmful diseases that otherwise never would have been exposed to large, dense human populations. According to Wallace, “The overlapping economic geography extends back from the Wuhan market to the hinterlands where exotic and traditional foods are raised by operations bordering the edge of a contracting wilderness.” It is these “frontiers of capitalist production,” the boundaries of which are constantly pushed by expansionary agribusiness, in which “human pathogens that emerge from animals spill over from wildlife to local human communities.” The vast majority of the time, the communities most affected are the poorest ones in the Global South, least able to defend themselves from the pressures of global agricultural production.
Whether COVID did in fact emerge directly from wildlife in the Huanan Market in Wuhan or from a laboratory leak, the future of emergent pandemics may very well be defined by the increasingly frequent interactions with exotic animal viruses at the frontiers of agricultural production. This story, of the reckless expansion of agribusiness, is one that should be told alongside discussions of theories about COVID’s specific origins. If the goal of learning the truth about why pandemics like COVID happen is to prevent them from happening again, then we should also understand the much deeper and more systemic interaction between questions of epidemiology and capitalist production.
