A majority of Americans believe the lab-leak theory

 I received this breaking-news update on this item this morning.  This is from Politico:

Most Americans now believe that the coronavirus leaked from a laboratory in China, according to a new POLITICO-Harvard poll that found a dramatic shift in public perception of Covid-19’s origins over the last year...

In March 2020, a Pew Research Center poll found 29 percent of Americans believed the virus was made in a Chinese lab and released either accidentally or intentionally. The new survey shows 52 percent believe the virus came out of a lab, including 59 percent of Republicans and 52 percent of Democrats, while 28 percent said it was from an infected animal.

The absence of a large partisan gap on the issue is particularly striking, said Bob Blendon, a professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who designed the poll.

“Usually, our polls find a big split between Republicans and Democrats, so this is unique,” he said. “More conservative media have been carrying the ‘lab leak’ issue, and it’s been a Trump talking point from the beginning, so we expected people who lean Democratic would say either ‘It’s not true’ or ‘I don’t know.’ But the belief is bipartisan.”

Blendon said Democrats likely became more receptive to the idea after President Joe Biden’s recent order that intelligence agencies investigate the virus’ origin and comments from Anthony Fauci, the White House chief medical officer, that it's worth digging into. Fauci and other scientists have cautioned the answer may never be known definitively.

 My thoughts and comments continue after the break.

1.  This story seems to illustrate that both the media and prominent politicians continue to exert tremendous influence on what Americans know (or think they know).  This surely reflects how tribal American politics are now: Trump influences was Republicans think; Biden influences what Democrats think.  As for the media, many outlets are more or less openly tribal themselves; while those outlets which attempt to be objective still can serve as conduits for politically potent messaging. 

2.  These poll results are somewhat distressing, in that, to the best of my knowledge, there is no direct proof that the virus originated in a lab leak.  The lab leak hypothesis always has been plausible, but nobody has demonstrated it to be true.  Nor, to the best of my knowledge, has anyone who has worked in the lab (some western scientists have done research in the Wuhan  Institute of Virology) expressed any certain knowledge that the virus originated this way.  Some have said it's possible; others have said it's exceedingly unlikely.  The Chinese government has stated the virus didn't escape from the lab; some people accept that statement, other's don't.   And at least one alternative theory which doesn't require a lab leak also is plausible:  that the virus "jumped" from another species to humans.  So-called "wet markets", in Wuhan or elsewhere, have been identified as a possible source of the virus being present in another species (such as pangolins).  I have read elsewhere that the virus hasn't been identified yet as being present in one of these wet-market species, nor in likely intermediate species such as bats, so we would have to classify the interspecies-transmission hypothesis as standing next to the lab leak hypothesis in the plausible-but-no-proof category.

It's good to exercise due epistemological modesty on this topic, because of the geopolitical implications.  There already is much tension between China and the US.  Whatever our policies we devise toward this partner and adversary should be based on what is known and what is true, rather than what polls indicate that the American people believe.

3.  How do we know what we think we know?  I'd like to suggest that this is a question that every Christian should ponder, because we believe - which is to say, we think we know - some things which many other people look upon with skepticism: that this man Jesus of Nazareth really was God's son, that he rose from the dead, that he ascended into heaven, that his mother was assumed into heaven, that the Eucharistic elements are changed into his body, blood, soul and divinity, that he is spiritually present with us today, that the Holy Spirit guides the Catholic church, and many other things which are difficult to prove.

I suspect that, for most believing Christians, their personal belief is founded upon some combination of three different elements:

• An appeal to authority: we believe because our parents, teachers, pastors and/or other influential persons inculcated into us their own faith and spiritual practices and habits.  We might also file under this category the larger cultural influences of living in a community with many believers, or being rooted in an ethnicity with a strong and distinctive faith identity.
• Someone moved us to belief with persuasive and inspiring faith witness.  This could be via the spoken or the written word. The bible itself could be that inspirational source.
• We ourselves have had personal spiritual experiences which were powerful and memorable enough to move us to embrace Christian faith, or which have awakened and strengthened dormant and wavering faith 

The first two of these bullets can be classified as forms of witness and evangelization.  Witnesses are not always reliable - in fact, sometimes they aren't even right. 

The third bullet comes under the heading of subjective experience.  We would need to acknowledge that this also is not always reliable; people are easily misled, they make mistakes of interpretation and judgment, and so on.

Personally, I'm skeptical of many things which people claim to know and believe.  To mention a few topical items: there are many people - tens of millions! - who apparently believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent on a mass scale, and Donald Trump actually won the election.  There are many adults who think it is better not to be vaccinated than to be vaccinated, for a variety of reasons, almost none of which strike me as well-thought-out (the exception are those who can't be vaccinated for serious medical reasons).  There are many who are convinced that the best explanation for UFOs is that aliens are among us.  There are many who think the positions of the planets and stars influence or even control our behavior.  

I'd think that, in any ranking of all-time great human achievements, the development of the scientific method is at or near the top.  That which we can feel most secure about knowing is that which is demonstrable, and repeatable, using the laws of physics, mathematics and reason.  But as our country's mixed experience in getting vaccinated suggests, even the fruits of the scientific method aren't persuasive to large numbers of people.  

Nor can science, by itself, explain everything satisfactorily.  In our courts of law, we have developed a method of adversarial trials, in which the fruits of science - physical evidence - are supplemented by sworn testimony, all of which is subjected to skeptical interrogation and argumentation, in order that a judge or a jury can determine what is true - what actually occurred.  It is a good system but it is far from perfect, and occasionally, miscarriages of justices, some of them spectacular, are known to occur.

Each of us has to use our best judgment, using the inputs of of observation, reason, experience, discussion, debate and trusted sources of information to discern what is true - to discern what we know.  And yet I frequently am left with the sense that I *know* very little indeed.

I am certainly not ready to say that I *know*, nor even *believe*, that the coronavirus originated from a lab leak in Wuhan.  It is plausible, but not yet *known*.  I hope everyone else is as skeptical as I am.