But the question of blame is a complicated one, even if one credits the lab-leak theory, since, as Baker documented, the work being done at the Wuhan Institute was in partnership with American scientists and institutions, and was funded in part by both the NIH and the Pentagon. To a degree that is hard to fathom given conventional wisdom about “the new Cold War,” the dangerous research at the heart of the lab-leak hypothesis was conducted largely in the spirit of basic cooperation and coordination, even though both countries regarded it as sensitive work bound up in national-security interests. This is a basic confusion of the whole “new Cold War” framework: The two most powerful countries in the world are, transparently, rivals, and yet they are also, in almost inextricable ways, partners. They are not — as the Cold War analogy suggests — competitive, self-contained empires operating from incompatible ideologies and separated by an Iron Curtain; they are something much more complicated and intertwined, if not quite one economy ruled by two governments. The midcentury U.S. did not import its prescription drugs from the Soviet Union, or the equivalent of its flatscreen TVs and iPhones, and if a Hollywood actor made an offhand remark about the refugees who fled the Russian revolution he wasn’t shamed into recanting — in Russian. (This sort of apology was what happened when the actor John Cena, promoting the ninth Fast and the Furious film, casually referred to Taiwan as its own country.) Whether or not the coronavirus pandemic is the result of a lab leak, the Chinese government has behaved terribly in blocking any real investigation into its origins. And if the pandemic was the result of a leak, those who let it happen and those who presumably helped cover it up deserve some real blame, for the millions who’ve lost their lives and all of those who have otherwise suffered from the virus. But so would the American scientists who inaugurated this kind of research, and those who oversaw and helped fund it. Indeed, if we take the lab-leak theory seriously — even, as Engber suggests, “act as though it is true” — the most direct lesson is ultimately much simpler than geopolitics. It would mean that what is probably the gravest global public-health crisis in a century bore a human signature. That signature would spell “hubris,” since even the most innocent possible lab-leak origin story still involves the large-scale hunting, collecting, gathering, and transporting of exotic animal viruses for storage in centralized facilities — facilities often much closer to human populations than the diseases had been “naturally,” and which, in at least this one very consequential case, had failed the basic functions of security and safety. If Chernobyl canceled our nuclear future, or at least delayed it a generation or two, then surely a lab-leak version of COVID-19 might entirely eliminate this genre of virus research, too.