jarun011 / Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

Last summer, Michael Imperiale, a University of Michigan virologist and 10-year member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, published an essay on the need to “rethink” some basic research-safety practices in light of the coronavirus pandemic. But he and his co-author—another biosecurity-board veteran—did want to make one thing clear: There was no reason to believe that sloppy or malicious science had had anything to do with the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; to suggest otherwise was “more akin to a conspiracy theory than to a scientifically credible hypothesis.”

Nine months later, Imperiale has a somewhat different view. “In my mind, the preponderance of the evidence still points toward a natural origin,” he told me earlier this week. “But that delta between the nature evidence and the lab-escape evidence appears to be shrinking.”

[David Frum: The pro-Trump culture war on American scientists]

Indeed, the slow sedimentation of doubts about COVID-19’s origin—whether the virus that causes it jumped directly from bats or other wild animals, or made a pit stop on a lab bench in Wuhan, China—has lately turned into a flood. In just the past two weeks, deltas have been in flux not just among the nation’s leading biosafety experts, but also among public-health officials, pundits, and journalistsat major dailies. The assertion by WHO investigators in February that a lab-leak origin for the pandemic was “extremely unlikely” has since been challenged by the WHO director general, Tedros Ghebreyesus; a May 14 letter to Science magazine, signed by 18 scientists, called for “a proper investigation” and “dispassionate science-based discourse on this difficult but important issue”; David Frum suggested last week in The Atlantic that the Biden administration should “take possession of the truth about the virus”; and the election forecaster Nate Silver declared on Sunday that his estimated likelihood of a laboratory origin had increased by half, to 60 percent. Today, President Joe Biden said that the United States intelligence community still hasn’t decided which hypothesis is more likely, and that he wants to get “closer to a definitive conclusion” by the end of August.

This shift is all the more remarkable for its lack of any major associated revelations. Arguments in favor of the “lab-leak hypothesis” remain grounded, as they ever were, in the mere and highly suspicious fact that a coronavirus likely borne by bats, likely from a cave in southwest China, emerged 18 months ago, quite suddenly, in a city very far from southwest China—where researchers had assembled an archive of cave-bat-borne coronaviruses. Much of the rest is window dressing. That the lab-leak hypothesis is gaining currency even as the facts remain the same has a useful implication, though. It suggests that definitive proof is not an absolute requirement. The SARS-CoV-2 outbreak has killed millions of people. It might have started in the wild, or it might have started in a lab. We know enough to acknowledge that the second scenario is possible, and we should therefore act as though it’s true.

According to the May 14 letter to Science, the one demanding “a proper investigation” of COVID-19’s origins, “knowing how COVID-19 emerged is critical for informing global strategies to mitigate the risk of future outbreaks.”

Just about every magazine story, Substack post, and piece of commentary about the lab-leak hypothesis includes a line like this, dropped like a smoke bomb, right up near the top. Did COVID-19 emerge from wildlife or might the virus have slipped out from a lab? “That urgent question is key to preventing the emergence of a SARS-CoV-3 or a COVID-29,” began one feature from March. “It matters a lot, because knowing how a virus-driven pandemic begins focuses our attention on preventing similar situations,” another article said in April. And “it matters a great deal which is the case if we hope to prevent a second such occurrence,” the science journalist Nicholas Wade wrote in a widely read essay earlier this month.

[Shadi Hamid: China is avoiding blame by trolling the world]

That’s a simple, unconvincing notion. The project to identify the source of the coronavirus pandemic surely has moral, legal, and political significance; but with regard to global public health—and to the crucial project of pandemic-proofing for the future—its outcome matters only at the margins. To say that we’ll need to know the exact origin of SARS-CoV-2 in order to set policies for staving off SARS-CoV-3 commits us to the path of hindsight bias: It’s a pledge to keep on fighting the last war against emerging pathogens, if not a blueprint for constructing the next Maginot Line.

What information, really, would we get from a “proper investigation”? At best, we’ll have identified one more place to look for natural spillovers, or one more type of catastrophic accident: useful data, sure, but in the broader sense, just another case study added to a paltry set. Of the smattering of pandemics in the past century, one—the 1977 Russian flu—has been cited as the possible result of a laboratory accident. Whatever we might discover about the genesis of COVID-19 (and whether we discover anything at all), this historical record is bound to look more or less the same: Nearly all pandemics appear to have a natural source; possibly one or two have emerged, and more might do so in the future, from research settings.

Instead of calling for a new and better inquiry into origins, let’s stipulate that pandemics can result from natural spillovers or from laboratory accidents—and then let’s move along to implications. One important question has already gotten airtime (from right-wing media, at least): Should scientists be fiddling with pathogenic genomes, to measure out the steps they’d have to take before ascending to pandemic-level virulence? Should the National Institutes of Health be funding them? This was the subject of a fierce, unresolved debate among virologists that started back in 2012; it still isn’t clear to what extent such research helps prevent devastating outbreaks, and to what extent it poses a realistic risk of creating them.

Other questions include: Should coronavirus samples gathered from the wild be studied at moderate biosafety levels, as appears to have been the case at the Wuhan Institute of Virology? Is there any significant cost, in terms of preparing for the next pandemic, from slowing down surveillance work with more demanding safety regulations? And should China end the practice of transporting virus-laden guano from sparsely populated regions to population centers, as appears to have been the case in Wuhan? (One might also ask: Should studies of Ebola, or other outbreak-ready pathogens, be carried out in Boston?) As Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, told me this week, we may yet discover that the COVID-19 story is a variation on “a small-town virus brought to the city, and suddenly becoming a star.”

Or we might be due for a far more substantial inquiry into the risks of scientific research. If we’re ready to acknowledge that a lab-induced pandemic is possible, and that we may be seeing the result, then “we’ll need to understand that the next major threat to public health could come from something else in biology—something that destroys crops, or changes the ocean, or changes the atmosphere,” Sam Weiss Evans, a biosecurity-governance scholar, told me. “This could be a moment of reckoning for the much wider biological community.”

For the moment, though, these discussions are on hold, while scientists chase—probably in vain—a full vetting of the lab-leak hypothesis.

They are not so process-obsessed when it comes to the “spillover” hypothesis, which, after all, is also wanting for direct evidence in the case of COVID-19. The Stanford University microbiologist David Relman—one of the organizers of the Science letter, and a former colleague of Michael Imperiale’s on the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity—told me this week that the research community already accepts that natural spillovers occur, and that they can cause dangerous outbreaks, so it doesn’t need any further proof. Scientists are bound to push ahead with efforts to prevent and anticipate human encounters with animals that harbor potentially dangerous viruses, he said. “That will happen almost regardless of what we learn now.”

Relman isn’t expecting a similar approach to laboratory safety. The idea that a lab accident might cause a pandemic “is a very difficult, uncomfortable scenario for many scientists to accept,” he said. Without more specific evidence in favor of the lab-leak hypothesis, “people will wring their hands and talk about it, just as they have since 2012, but I don’t think a lot will change to reduce the risk.”

[Karl Taro Greenfeld: We may never know the full story of COVID-19]

More specific evidence may never arrive, however, even after further study by the WHO or the CIA. A “proper investigation” might, at any rate, prove counterproductive. What happens if it drags on into the future, and never lands on anything concrete? (What if no one can agree on what constitutes substantive evidence?) Or what if researchers discover that SARS-CoV-2 really did begin in bats, or pangolins, or frozen meat? These outcomes wouldn’t make the risk of lab leaks go away, yet they’d surely shrink the scientific community’s inclination to address it.

“There’s a possibility of a lab escape,” Imperiale told me, and we should act on it, no matter what. “We don’t want to be asking these same questions again 10 years from now.” At this point, calls for further investigation are as likely to become an instrument of delay as of persuasion.

Jailed Kremlin critic accuses prison authorities of censoring his newspapers and denying him access to books.

When the Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko plucked a dissident journalist out of the sky, he proved two things: that his 27-year grip on power is unhindered by international isolation, and that, absent meaningful action by the United States and Europe—whose citizens were among the passengers on the hijacked flight—nothing is going to change.

That, at least, is how Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya sees it. “Since December, we haven’t had any sanctions; we haven’t had any high-profile meetings,” the Belarusian opposition leader and self-styled leader of democratic Belarus told me from her office in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, where the Ryanair flight carrying the Belarusian opposition journalist Roman Protasevich was headed. Protasevich never made it to Vilnius, though, and neither did his girlfriend—both were detained after the flight was diverted to Minsk under the ruse that the Palestinian militant group Hamas had made a bomb threat (it had not). Tsikhanouskaya took the same flight only a week ago, and she told me she would have never imagined that something like that could happen. “Maybe I could be in Roman’s place,” she said.

That place is a Minsk detention center, where Protasevich appears to have been beaten and forced to confess to “organizing mass riots.” Tsikhanouskaya, meanwhile, remains in Vilnius, fighting the Belarusian prodemocracy movement’s corner on the world stage. Although her meetings with leaders and international bodies have reaped key wins—including widespread international refusal to recognize Lukashenko as the rightful leader of Belarus following last summer’s fraudulent presidential election, as well as U.S. and European sanctions against top Belarusian officials—they appear to have had little effect on the staying power of Europe’s last dictator. “The threat of sanctions stops [Lukashenko] from escalating violence,” Tsikhanouskaya told me during our Zoom call, “and that’s why very strong steps should be taken right now.”

Some steps have been taken since Protasevich’s kidnapping, albeit ones narrowly tailored to the interception of the Ryanair flight and the detention of the journalist, who is perhaps best known for being one of the original editors behind a popular Telegram channel used to organize demonstrations at the height of the grassroots prodemocracy movement last summer. In addition to calling for further EU sanctions, European leaders have also advocated for the bloc to ban Belarusian airlines from accessing the bloc’s airspace and airports. Britain announced that it too would consider sanctions, and advised U.K. airlines against flying over Belarusian airspace. In the U.S., President Joe Biden welcomed the call for further sanctions, noting that the U.S. would work to develop its own retaliatory measures in cooperation with allies.

Tsikhanouskaya said that it would be a mistake for world leaders to see these recent events as separate from the overall situation in Belarus, where more than 400 political prisoners continue to languish in prison. But she admits that getting countries to continue caring about the fight for democracy in her home country—which this weekend marks the first anniversary of the beginning of the movement against Lukashenko’s rule—hasn’t always been easy. “Sometimes you see real support and a real wish to help,” she said of her meetings with politicians and diplomats, “and sometimes in meetings, you see empty eyes.” In the latter instances, she told me, she tries to steel herself and turn off her emotions, to “just tell them mechanically what is happening.”

When I asked Tsikhanouskaya what practical steps she would want to see governments take, she told me that tougher sanctions, of the kind the U.S. reimposed on nine Belarusian state-owned enterprises earlier this year, are vital. “They turned out to be the most effective,” she said, noting that some companies have halted trade with Belarus as a result. She also wants an international conference focused on resolving the crisis in Belarus—one that she has previously said should include representatives from both Moscow and Minsk. (Although Tsikhanouskaya has expressed hopes that the Belarusian opposition would be invited to attend next month’s G7 summit, in England, a British government spokesperson told me that “there are no current plans to invite further national participants,” though those who will be in attendance “will discuss current global issues, including Belarus’s reckless and dangerous behavior.”)

[Anne Applebaum: Other regimes will hijack planes too]

Just how fruitful those discussions will be, and whether they will result in genuine impact, remains to be seen. If Western countries focus on restrictions on Belarusian airspace and financial penalties for top Belarusian officials, it’s hard to see what effect those policies can have on the domestic situation there. Lukashenko has proved impervious to Western sanctions in large part because he knows that he can rely on the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who not only offered to deploy Russian police forces to quell Belarus’s prodemocracy protests if “the situation gets out of control,” but also provided Lukashenko with a $1.5 billion loan. Whether Moscow supported Lukashenko’s decision to hijack a plane is unclear, but some Russian state media were quick to offer their praise.

This isn’t the first time Tsikhanouskaya has expressed disappointment over the international community’s response to what is happening in Belarus. When I spoke with her in December, the Belarusian opposition was optimistic about the influence of the incoming Biden administration, and she told me she believed that Europe could be “braver” and “stronger” in its response. She still does.

But she also thinks that perhaps she and other Belarusians overestimated the speed at which support would come—and underestimated Lukashenko’s cruelty. Had international pressure more quickly and forcefully coincided with the protests’ peak, she mused, perhaps things would have changed by now.

[Read: ‘I believe that the U.S.A. can be the crucial player’]

But the way Tsikhanouskaya sees it, just because Lukashenko remains in power doesn’t mean he has won. “He is in his palace,” she said, “but he is not in the heads and hearts of people anymore, and this is what matters.”

She plans to continue seeking support from the international community, including the Biden administration, and hopes to visit Washington, D.C., once COVID-19 restrictions are no longer an impediment. When I asked her whether this past week has made her fearful for her safety while traveling, she told me that in the year since she became the face of this movement, “I doubt that there was a day when I didn’t feel fear.” But it didn’t stop her then, and it won’t now.

“While I’m free,” she said, “I’m going to fight.”

A Japanese fishing boat collided with a 662-ton Russian ship and capsized off Hokkaido on Wednesday, leaving three crew members dead, local authorities said.