New Study Refutes Wacky Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory — Which Is Just What You’d Expect Them to Say

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An internet conspiracy theory about the coronavirus has apparently gained enough traction for researchers to feel the need to conduct a study on it, and that study has concluded that Covid-19 was not in fact concocted in a laboratory as a bioweapon.

According to ABC News, researchers were alarmed enough by the din from conspiracy theorists promoting the idea that the coronavirus was created in a lab that they decided to conduct a study refuting them:

“There’s a lot of speculation and conspiracy theories that went to a pretty high level,” Dr. Robert Garry, a professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine and one of the authors of the study, told ABC News, “so we felt it was important to get a team together to examine evidence of this new coronavirus to determine what we could about the origin.”

To that end, Garry and his team — Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, and Edward C. Holmes — conducted a “comparative analysis of genomic data” to determine the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19.

The results of that study are that SARS-CoV-2 “is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” and that the researchers “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

To which conspiracy theorists replied “Do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible? So you’re saying there’s a chance?”