Origins of the coronavirus

The debate over the origins of SARS-CoV-2 has been reignited with revelations that the United States Department of Energy has changed its opinion and now believes that the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic most likely leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, and did not emerge organically...

Then in a television interview on Tuesday, Christopher Wray, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said his agency too was of the opinion that the origins of the pandemic was most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan...

A tale of two theories. The debate is over whether the coronavirus emerged naturally possibly jumping from an animal host to humans in the same way as the SARS-1 virus in 2002 or accidentally escaped or leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the institute in the city where researchers had been working with coronaviruses for several years...

These two articles, published in reputable scientific journals very early in the pandemic when sufficient information or analysis could not have been available, almost completely discounted the possibility of the virus escaping from the laboratory, and shaped the narrative around the origins of the virus...

While the evidence for a lab leak is still not conclusive and the recent disclosures by US agencies are unlikely to change that it does remain the far simpler explanation, not least because unlike in the case of SARS-1 or MERS, the theory of natural emergence of the virus is yet to be established more than three years after the outbreak...

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