Have you heard the one about the pandemic starting in a lab? Apparently, two-thirds of Americans now believe it, which is up from just over half in 2021. Even the Democrats are getting on board with this theory (at least 53 percent of them). But even though we’re all convinced that this was a “man-made” disaster, it’s not really a hot topic anymore. It’s like we’ve decided that we can’t do anything about it, so let’s just focus on mask mandates and school closings instead. Because that makes sense, right?

Now, we’re not saying that these polling numbers are flimsy, but let’s be real here – we haven’t exactly conducted a ton of surveys on this topic. So, take these numbers with a grain of salt. However, if they are accurate, it’s pretty shocking that we’re not more concerned about where this whole thing came from. It’s like if there were a massive earthquake, and instead of investigating whether it was caused by fracking, we just focused on how poorly we responded to the disaster. Or if we were dealing with a terrifying cancer cluster, and all we talked about was chemotherapy instead of figuring out where the tumors came from in the first place.

We get it, though. When disaster strikes, the first priority is to triage and respond. But maybe, just maybe, we should be more focused on figuring out how this all happened. It’s kind of important, don’t you think?

Let’s play a game of “what if.” What if we had known that COVID-19 was the result of gain-of-function research and had escaped from a lab back in 2020, when it was still mostly confined to China? Would we have freaked out even more? Probably. We’re not exactly known for being chill when it comes to things like “superbugs.” Maybe we would’ve instituted travel bans even faster and taken the threat more seriously. Who knows? But one thing’s for sure – we definitely wouldn’t have assumed that this was just an Asian thing and carried on as usual.

Look, we can’t change the past. We can’t go back in time and make different decisions. All we can do now is learn from our mistakes and try to do better in the future. And who knows? Maybe in twenty years, we’ll be making jokes about that time we all got really into baking bread and obsessively watched Tiger King. But for now, let’s focus on the important stuff – like finding out where this whole pandemic thing came from.