Leak or Leap? Evidence and Cognition Surrounding the Origins of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus

The Covid-19 pandemic has engendered numerous conspiracy theories, ranging from the claim that the disease itself is a hoax to the belief that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and was released by mistake or as a bioweapon. This "lab leak" theory arose early on during the pandemic and was dismissed as an unlikely conspiracy theory by many scientists. Instead, most scientists favored a zoonotic origin, involving a leap of the virus from an intermediate host animal or directly from bats to humans. Nearly two years later, the lab leak theory continues to attract attention, and even the US intelligence community has been unable to unambiguously determine the origin of the virus. Could the lab leak theory point to a genuine conspiracy? Or is the lab leak theory simply a political tool to blame China for the pandemic? And how would we ever know? We briefly summarize how scientific evidence might adjudicate this question, and we discuss how flawed arguments and conspiratorial rhetoric can be identified that, even if well-intentioned, obscure rather than illuminate the hunt for the virus. We show how much of the reasoning underlying the lab leak hypothesis fulfills criteria for conspiracist cognition.