Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. keeps insisting that RSV — respiratory syncytial virus, which puts more U.S. babies in the hospital than any other virus — escaped from a lab. It didn’t, and as The Atlantic’s Tom Bartlett reports, the historical record isn’t remotely ambiguous on the point.
On CNN and Fox News in August, Kennedy said RSV “came from a laboratory,” linking it to gain-of-function-style experiments. He also called it “the biggest killer of kids in this country today.” (Per the CDC, cancer kills more children.) In his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci, he went further, writing that the virus “entered polio vaccines at the Walter Reed Hospital laboratories in 1955” and caused a “devastating pandemic.”
There’s a kernel of real history here. In 1955, 14 chimpanzees at a Walter Reed Army Institute of Research annex came down with cold-like symptoms, and researchers isolated the culprit. In 1956, a lab worker exposed to infected chimps fell ill with the same virus.
But RSV was already everywhere. In 1957, Johns Hopkins researchers found that 80 percent of Baltimore children tested had RSV antibodies by age 4 — evidence the virus jumped from humans to chimps, not the reverse. A 2007 study detected RSV proteins in lung tissue from a child who died in 1931, and an 1819 treatise describes an “acute suffocative catarrh” matching RSV’s symptoms. Genetic analysis suggests the virus’s ancestors have circulated for centuries.
Mis- and disinformation are distorting...
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. keeps insisting that RSV — respiratory syncytial virus, which puts more U.S. babies in the hospital than any other virus — escaped from a lab. It didn’t, and...