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Conversation

Dr. Jeffrey Lewis

@ArmsControlWonk

Etymology can be very revealing.

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Thursday morning thought-- where did the phrase "lab leak" come from? I don't think I have heard it often used to describe laboratory accidents before...for example, it wasn't mentioned in this piece about the SARS exposure in 2003

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Dr. Jeffrey Lewis

@ArmsControlWonk

Going through Nexis, the term "lab leak" appears occasionally in news about past events (Winnipeg 1999, China 2004 and the UK 2007) but it is largely confined to headlines where space is tight.

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Dr. Jeffrey Lewis

@ArmsControlWonk

Scholar articles are more revealing. There are very few uses of "lab leak" or "laboratory leak" in scholarly journals *except* in reference to the current pandemic. scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22L

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Dr. Jeffrey Lewis

@ArmsControlWonk

By contrast, "laboratory escape" is the term that appears in scholar articles over and over again. scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&

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Dr. Jeffrey Lewis

@ArmsControlWonk

What I take away from this little exercise is that the word choice ("lab leak" instead of "lab escape") suggests which groups of people propagating this idea -- journalists and pundits much more so than virologists or epidemiologists.

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“Lab leak” is almost perhaps more memetically contagious in online era due to alliteration

1:02 PM · Jun 10, 2021