Plagues, poisons and magical thinking – how COVID lab leak hysteria could be straight from the Middle Ages

• Earlier this year, the US Department of Energy and FBI endorsed the same theory.
• The lab leak theory remains a legitimate hypothesis to investigate.
• These exploded into mass violence in the mid-14th century, and survive in later legends about witches’ ability to concoct poisonous agents.

Poisonous powders and plagues

• Who among us never felt compelled to disinfect our groceries or mail during the early months of the pandemic?
• The threat of disease is layered onto suspicious “others” – such as Jews during the Middle Ages, or Chinese labs today.
• Jews were accused of concocting poisonous powders from spiders, toads and human remains – the ingredients form a running list of items invoking disgust and fear of infection.
• The contagion effect easily convinced medieval Christians that a terrible disease must originate with people already considered suspicious.

Conspiracy and Christianity

• There are similar fears of magical contagion in theories about the lab leak being the pandemic’s origin.
• We continue to be swayed by the idea that some specific agency must be responsible, rather than unpredictable processes of virus mutation.
• Even China has embraced this logic, with various suggestions made about the virus emerging somewhere (anywhere) outside its borders.
• So is the a priori assumption that nefarious intentions lie somewhere behind every major event, a cornerstone of conspiratorial thinking both ancient and modern.

Viral magical thinking

• Such accusations attempt to impose coherence on a profoundly uncertain situation, and suggest a reassuring narrative of clear cause and effect rather than random chance.
• In the eyes of lab-leak theory advocates, the desire to hide information suggests something more nefarious than a simple desire to avoid blame.
• But embracing an argument built on a tissue of circumstantial evidence is also part of the conspiracy theory playbook: magical thinking enters the grey zone of unanswered questions to create elaborate narratives of false reassurance.