A fact-checker’s eye is drawn instinctively to puzzle pieces that don’t seem to fit.
We also go on alert where discourse is intensely polarized, and where discussants have leapt to intense positional commitments before much at all is known about the matter at hand.
So it is with COVID-19’s origin story. Natural outbreak, or lab leak? I’m not competent to adjudicate the debate at codon-by-codon level, but I do take notice of COVID behavior that probably means something, but doesn’t immediately mesh well with either hypothesis.
Here’s the odd bit: Roughly coincident with its appearance in human, SARS-CoV-2 also infected other primates, felines of every size and stripe, canines (with lesser enthusiasm), mustelids (mink, ferrets, weasels), ungulates, pigs, rabbits and some rodents (hamsters, voles, but not common lab mice) … in addition to fruit bats and their insectivore cousins the shrews.
COVID-19 is not merely “pandemic” — meaning it affects our species all over the map at once. It’s something else. Something we may need a new word for. Is it ”pangenomic”? “Panspecific”, meaning it affects species all over the mammalian map at once? If there’s a word for this, maybe it originates in sci-fi rather than med-lit.
If the virus was innately capable of such phylogenetic range — or even lurked a SNP or two short of it — why had it not broken out before and jumped from species to species all over the map? Susceptible groups include a wide range of predators and scavengers, who should have come into repeated contact with whatever natural reservoir it had.
On the other hand, what lab has the tools to take an obscure virus and equip it for so many acrobatic leaps? Did even Dr. Evil’s alma mater Evil Medical School have this in their curriculum?
We might expect a virus to replicate under intense evolutionary pressure from the time it first establishes a beachhead in Patient Zero. But how on earth did it open so many doors to so many new hosts at once? Was there a master key, or had all these ACE-2 doors stood unlocked — but untried — from time immemorial?