Years have elapsed since the covid-19 pandemic inflicted its economic wounds, which are healing slowly, yet one political spectre it bequeathed—the dispute over the virus’s origins—refuses to fade. This protracted inquiry has evolved from a scientific endeavor into a costly, low-yield geopolitical tussle. In a world already fraught with peril, such fixation on the past constitutes a perilous indulgence.
Confronted with profound chaos, the human mind instinctively seeks order, and the simplest form lies in identifying a culprit. Reducing a complex, contingency-laden global calamity to a stark narrative of blame offers illusory certainty and moral solace. This primal urge to scapegoat, emergent amid the virus’s rampage in 2020, was astutely harnessed on the geopolitical stage as a potent political instrument.
The modern information ecosystem provided the ideal incubator for this assault. Within algorithmically curated echo chambers, suspicion hardened into conviction, and allegiance supplanted evidence. Scientific caution was politicized as concealment. And so, the search for origins ceased to be the domain of scientists, degenerating instead into a tribal conflict rooted in identity and open to all.
Sociologist Erving Goffman observed that stigmatization proceeds through labelling, stereotyping, and social isolation; historian William H. McNeill stressed that epidemics expose and exacerbate pre-existing societal fissures. History is ever-present, our predicament a contemporary reprise of ancient scripts. The very name “Spanish flu” of 1918 stemmed from geopolitical happenstance. Belligerents in the First World War, desperate to sustain morale, imposed stringent censorship to suppress reports of domestic outbreaks. Neutral Spain, with its candid press, unwittingly became the pandemic’s eponym—tarnishing its name and, more gravely, misleading other nations into underestimating proximate threats, at a grievous cost.
Further back, in 14th-century Europe, the Black Death spawned venomous narratives of blame. Jewish communities were accused of poisoning wells, as entrenched religious prejudice and economic resentment found an outlet in plague-induced apocalyptic dread, culminating in brutal massacres and violent expulsions. Be it the “Spanish flu” or the anti-Jewish pogroms, the pattern remains strikingly uniform: an incomprehensible catastrophe, layered upon latent social tensions, ignites the blaze of stigmatization.
Yet the gravest harm of this debate lies not in the divisions it deepens, but in its immense opportunity cost. In 2025, the world is riven by more urgent crises—from the scorched earth of Ukraine to the rubble of Gaza, geopolitical fault lines run deeper than ever. Meanwhile, America’s record $38 trillion national debt looms, a Damoclean sword over global financial stability. For ordinary people grappling with the cost of living, obsessing over past culpability neither pays the bills nor mends fractured supply chains. Hatred offers no escape; it is not even cheap anesthesia.
In what economist Adam Tooze terms an era of “polycrisis,” humanity’s finite collective attention is its most precious strategic asset. Yet some irresponsible media seem intent on squandering it on an interminable detective game. The dispute has become a vast “attention sinkhole,” draining the political will and diplomatic energy better directed at the perils of the present. While we quibble over whether the virus slipped from a lab or a market, we forfeit the chance to reform the World Health Organization, to erect a global pandemic alert system, and to prepare for the inevitable next outbreak. Such persistence trades the future for the fleeting catharsis of the present.
What, then, is the path forward? It may lie in a fundamental shift in perspective: from a fixation on backward-looking accountability to an embrace of forward-looking collective responsibility. The philosopher Iris Marion Young incisively distinguished the “liability model”—retrospective, seeking a single perpetrator for past wrongs—from the “social connection model”—prospective, acknowledging dispersed responsibility within complex structures, where all must collaborate to mend the system and avert recurrence.
Applying this to global public health demands that we transcend the blame game. Scientific inquiries into the origin should persist on independent, depoliticized tracks, but they must not be a precondition for international cooperation. A leader’s paramount duty is to guide people through adversity, not to scour the ruins for scapegoats. Fostering economic growth and collaboration to enhance human welfare is the truly profound and urgent agenda.
This forward-looking ethos requires redirecting our energies from courtroom adjudication to architectural construction. It entails designing a resilient global health architecture. At its core must be a WHO unshackled from the funding dependencies of great powers and vested with genuine authority; underpinned by norms that treat vaccines and therapeutics as global public goods, not national assets; and sustained by an international consensus that rewards early warnings with trust and support, rather than deterring whistle-blowers with punitive isolation.
Ultimately, the COVID-19 origins enigma may, like so many historical riddles, remain forever shrouded in fog. To embrace such uncertainty is a mark of maturity. As recurrent pandemics attest, humanity has no alternative: as a species, we are destined to rise phoenix-like from disaster and confront the future. For in the end, what truly matters is not whence the virus came, but whither this dispute is propelling us: towards a world fragmented by suspicion and enmity, impotent before the next crisis, or one that recognizes our intertwined fates and commits to forging a shared defense? This is the one question that demands an answer.
