Scientist who signed letter supporting lab-leak theory: We didn't speak out sooner be

"I think we can't rule out some kind of lab accident," Dr. Stephen Goldstein of the University of Utah told Salon.

Goldstein said the lab leak hypothesis implied multiple unique scenarios.

"I would split the lab leak hypothesis into two things," he added. "One possibility that's been raised within that hypothesis is that this is a natural virus that was brought into the lab and somebody was working with it and got infected, and that's how it got out. And the other one that I think is very heavily pushed in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article is that this virus was somehow created in a lab. I think the likelihood of that latter possibility is close to zero."

Goldstein made it clear that he still thinks the lab leak hypothesis is unlikely. Still, he acknowledged it is within the realm of possibility that someone at the Wuhan Institute of Virology swabbed a bat for coronaviruses, brought those viruses back to the lab to be studied, and then got accidentally infected.

The same cannot be said for the idea that it was manufactured, as Dr. Susan Weiss — a University of Pennsylvania professor who has studied coronaviruses for decades — explained.

"I definitely believe it was not manmade," the microbiologist told Salon. "I can't prove that it didn't quote-unquote escape from the lab, but I'm sure it was not, and this is the reason. When you manufacture a virus, first of all, you always have to start with the backbone of another virus. You can't just say go make a virus of 30,000 nucleotides, because it wouldn't make any sense. You couldn't possibly design something, so you'd have to see what looks like remnants or resemblance to another known virus."

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