Coronavirus or Covid-19 is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It is a viral disease that turned into a pandemic in early 2020. The first known case was recorded in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Coronavirus has multiple variants such as Delta and Omicron, and its most common symptoms are fever, chills and sore throat.
The virus spreads through liquid particles when the infected person coughs, sneezes or breathes – it has a high multiplication rate. Therefore, the world had taken measures to quarantine or isolate those infected. While the disease can be mild and recoverable, those older or with underlying medical conditions are more likely to be adversely affected. The disease caused according to WHO estimates 3 million deaths in 2020.
Mr. Rao contends that “Nicholas Wade was highly respected in scientific and journalistic circles.”. This assertion is quite debatable. Mr. Wade wrote a book “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History “that was widely denounced by the scientific community for misrepresenting research into human population genetics.”, as anyone can look up on Wikipedia.
Further, “The New York Times Book Review published an open letter signed by 139 senior faculty members in population genetics and evolutionary biology which read:[
Wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in I.Q. test results, political institutions and economic development. We reject Wade’s implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. They do not. We are in full agreement that there is no support from the field of population genetics for Wade’s conjectures.
After publication, the letter was signed by four more faculty members.[7] In response to the letter, Wade said these scientists had misunderstood his intent.[5][6]”.
Given this one can make a reasonable argument that Mr. Wade is a controversial author whose assertions are not accepted in the scientific circles. So to use Mr. Wade’s arguments about the origins of the Covid virus as more reliable than what Dr. Fauci had to say, lacks credibility.
The more defensible position is to go with the more widely held consensus that Dr. Fauci and the rest of the scientific community did not know anything about the Covid virus when it first emerged, and as more was known about it, they updated their position as they should have.
No one ever said that the Covid virus was definitively not man-made and did not leak from a lab in China. The more widely held position is that it is more likely that the virus jumped from animals to humans than that it was man-made and leaked from a lab. One cannot come up with a more reasonable position in this debate.
NPR has this to say. “Some U.S. intelligence agencies have also expressed a low-to-moderate degree of confidence in the accidental lab leak theory.
But virologists who study pandemic origins are much less divided than the U.S. intelligence community. They say there is “very convincing” data and “overwhelming evidence” pointing to an animal origin.
In a report issued in June 2025, the World Health Organization stated: “the weight of available evidence … suggests zoonotic spillover … either directly from bats or through an intermediate host.”
That conclusion was based on three years of research by the 27 members of The WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens.”