In 2011, science jour­na­list Laurie Garrett wrote on the “alar­ming regu­la­ri­ty” of acci­dents in bio­sa­fe­ty labs around the world. The acci­dents are as much a mat­ter of num­bers as any one lab’s poor safe­ty record. A 2013 Princeton University stu­dy sho­wed an increa­sing glo­bal popu­la­tion expo­sed to the risk of acci­dents from bio­sa­fe­ty labo­ra­to­ries pur­suing stu­dies of some of the world’s most dan­ge­rous diseases.

The stu­dy, conduc­ted by health geo­gra­pher Thomas Van Boeckel and col­leagues, sho­wed the popu­la­tion living within the com­mu­ting field of BSL‑4 labs increa­sed by a fac­tor of four from 1990 to 2012. The fields sum­med toge­ther encap­su­late near­ly 2 percent of the world’s popu­la­tion. Any escape infec­tion could poten­tial­ly seed an out­break able to hop upon the glo­bal tra­vel net­work to infect the rest of the world in short order. Since 9/11, thou­sands of new BSL‑3 and ‑4 labs have been built for stu­dying patho­gens. The team noted a par­ti­cu­lar surge in Asia, des­cri­bing, among others, new labs in Taiwan, Singapore, Pune, Bhopal, and, lis­ted in the appen­dix, Wuhan.

The lab bubble appears to have ari­sen out of a com­bi­na­tion of legi­ti­mate concerns about emergent infec­tious diseases, the return of “res­pec­table” bio­war­fare research, the ideo­lo­gi­cal demands of the War on Terror, and the next ite­ra­tion in Keynesian mili­ta­ry eco­no­my. The sum effect includes pro­du­cing the very threat of out­break the labs were osten­si­bly set up to stop. Expanding such labs in num­ber and geo­gra­phic extent bends rare events like viral escape toward inevi­ta­bi­li­ty. The labs represent a poli­ti­cal logis­tics fol­ding in cal­cu­la­ted dan­gers that science pro­pa­gan­da spins away as so much conspi­ra­cy theo­ry.

In 2004 alone, four sepa­rate SARS escapes were repor­ted _out of the Chinese National Institute of Virology in Beijing. In 2018, the Wuhan Institute of Virology used a “less viru­lent” SARS strain to test lab disin­fec­tants. Are we going to pre­tend such things don’t hap­pen ?

You can find a dos­sier that an ano­ny­mous group of self-iden­ti­fied resear­chers put toge­ther in favor of the lab acci­dent theo­ry here. I find some of its infe­rences and cri­ti­cism on tar­get and others uncon­vin­cing.

So, what is the Solomonic choice here ? All the conten­ding parties—the United States and Chinese govern­ments, the EcoHealth Alliance, scien­tists, and conspi­ra­cy theo­rists alike—can piss off. Because they told us all to do so our­selves and are attemp­ting to dump res­pon­si­bi­li­ty on each other, let­ting the whole gang escape. Allowing such hubris to conti­nue to run amok would be an act of self-des­truc­tion beyond the COVID pan­de­mic and what cli­mate change alrea­dy has in store for us.

Philosopher Alain Badiou writes of libe­ral parliamentarianism’s neo-Kantian oppo­si­tion of truth and opi­nion. In the spec­tacle of debate, we are allo­wed to struggle over opi­nion, the core of the extreme center’s poli­tics, but truth is never up for grabs, we’re told. It’s ins­tead locked away in jour­nals and think tanks that the state and phi­lan­thro­ca­pi­ta­lists own. And the plebs—left cou­ghing on their couches, not from ritual fire but a virus, their pains and sor­rows untrue because these are care­ful­ly left undocumented—are never allo­wed access to the offi­cial sto­ry as a mat­ter of first prin­ciple.

Consciously or not, by devious intent or the best of inten­tions, in accep­ting what appear dia­me­tri­cal­ly oppo­sed pre­mises that in actua­li­ty are scat­te­red toge­ther around the dic­tates of capi­tal and the impe­rial states that serve it, the various fac­tions of power—money, poli­ti­cal class, the latest in colo­nial medicine—all back some ver­sion of expro­pria­tion or empire buil­ding that regu­lar­ly spring dead­ly diseases. By this sea­son, Midvinter 2019, that Great Game fini­shed off a drag race of pro­to­pan­de­mic SARS across lab and field alike.

One strain of the many still cir­cu­la­ting got out. I’m bet­ting this round that pan­de­mic SARS emer­ged along the increa­sin­gly indus­tria­li­zed wild ani­mal com­mo­di­ty chain from hin­ter­lands and bor­der towns as far south and west as Yunnan. On the last leg of its domes­tic tour, the virus made its way to Wuhan by truck or plane and then the world.