Lieber's arrest came just a couple of months before a positive coronavirus case was first registered in the United States. The hysteria that followed cloaked the possibility that Lieber himself was a component of the research that was being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology into genetically engineering a novel coronavirus.

At the time, the premise that the virus had a lab origin was relegated to the realm of being a conspiracy theory. Presently, that theory has become an all but incontrovertible fact.