The Shocking Rewrite of The Covid19 Origins Story (Part 2- Conclusion)

Continuing from Part 1…

The Origins of Covid-19 Are More Complicated Than Once Thought

Scientists used painstaking research, genomics, and clever statistics to definitively track two distinct strains of the virus back to a wet market in Wuhan.

A Different Theory of COVID-19’s Origin

Alina Chan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a genetic engineer who began doing some of the most controversial research into the coronavirus from her home. It started with the virus’s genetic blueprint: She’d studied SARS-CoV-1, which spread to humans back in 2003 and is closely related to the newer virus. What stood out to Chan was that it looked like the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, wasn’t having to adapt to spread like SARS-CoV-1 did, and she couldn’t figure out why. Chan typed up her findings and included scenarios that could explain them, including the possibility that a non–genetically engineered virus was grown in a lab and accidentally spilled. Her paper never claimed that the lab leak was the only explanation for the pandemic—just one that deserved consideration.

Are We Ever Going to Find Out COVID’s Origin? History Has Some Clues.

“This is a long and quite possibly fruitless effort, yet it is an essential one, both to understand this pandemic and to better strategize how to prevent the next one.” Angela Rasmussen,

China did 'little' to hunt for Covid origins in early months, says WHO document

Chinese officials did “little” in terms of epidemiological investigations into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan in the first eight months after the outbreak, according to an internal World Health Organization document seen by the Guardian.

China’s Refusal to Help Probes of Covid-19 Origins Leaves Critical Gap, Spy Chief Says

“China has not fully cooperated, and that is a key critical gap that would help us understand what, exactly, happened,” Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said during a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee. She committed to continuing to investigate the emergence of the virus, which has killed millions worldwide.

Disputes over COVID’s origins reveal an intelligence community in disarray. Here are 4 fixes we need before the next pandemic

This lack of consensus among intelligence agencies and low levels of confidence on their assessments are due to many factors. The variations in analytical judgements are mostly due to how each agency interprets what are, at best, fragmented intelligence sources. There’s also the question of how intelligence analysts comprehend complicated scientific research.

Fight Over Covid’s Origins Renews Debate on Risks of Lab Work

Talk of ‘gain-of-function’ research, a muddy category at best, brings up deep questions about how scientists should study viruses and other pathogens.

From ‘open-minded’ to ‘underwhelming,’ mixed reactions greet latest COVID-19 origin report

New WHO panel calls for more studies of different possibilities, including lab-leak scenario.

Investigate the origins of COVID-19

it was Chinese doctors, scientists, journalists, and citizens who shared with the world crucial information about the spread of the virus—often at great personal cost. We should show the same determination in promoting a dispassionate science-based discourse on this difficult but important issue.

Is the debate over the origin of Covid-19 still worth having?

The debate is between the natural-origin and lab-leak theories, and it is becoming increasingly sterile and ever-more vicious.

New Data Links Pandemic’s Origins to Raccoon Dogs at Wuhan Market

Genetic samples from the market were recently uploaded to an international database and then removed after scientists asked China about them.

Opinion: To stop the next pandemic, we need to unravel the origins of COVID-19

What’s even more troubling is that despite the critical importance of this question, efforts to investigate the origins of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus and of the associated disease, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), have become mired in politics, poorly supported assumptions and assertions, and incomplete information.

Origin story: what do we know now about where coronavirus came from?

When Chinese scientists alerted colleagues to a new virus last December, suspicion fell on a Wuhan market. What have health officials learned since then?

Origins of SARS-CoV-2

Let me be clear. While I do believe that a lab incident is the most likely origin of the pandemic, this is only a hypothesis. That this pandemic might stem from a zoonotic jump in the wild is also a hypothesis, even though very little evidence supporting that hypothesis has so far emerged. When comparing the evidence for each possibility, the case for a lab incident origin seems significantly stronger to me.

Scientists Call for Deeper Investigation Into Covid-19 Origin

The signatories include highly regarded scientists who are actively involved in studying SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the pandemic, such as Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle; Ralph Baric, a coronavirus researcher who has collaborated with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, the institution at the center of debate over the lab hypothesis; and David Relman, a microbiologist and immunologist at Stanford University School of Medicine. The letter is the latest and one of the most visible pushes for a more rigorous investigation into the origin of the pandemic following the WHO-led team’s report.

Understanding Where Coronaviruses Come From And How They Enter Humans

All it took was one coronavirus to turn the world upside down. But how many more are out there, lurking in animals? And what's the chance they could jump into people and trigger another outbreak?

We May Never Know the Full Story of COVID-19

Grit plus luck was sufficient to break open the SARS story. I doubt the same will be true for COVID-19.

We still don’t know the origins of the coronavirus. Here are 4 scenarios.

The search continues for the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19—and the pathway that it took to leap from animals to humans, wreaking havoc across the globe, infecting more than 129 million people, and killing more than 2.8 million.

What does the science say about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic?

Since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic began three years ago, its origin has been a topic of much scientific — and political — debate. Two main theories exist: The virus spilled over from an animal into people, most likely in a market in Wuhan, China, or the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and spread due to some type of laboratory accident.

What we know and don’t know about the origins of COVID-19

Scientists have generally concluded that it resembles naturally occurring viruses. But they are paying more attention to other possibilities.

Where Covid-19 came from is as much a political question as a scientific one

Yet since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic, concrete origins of SARS-CoV-2 haven’t yet emerged. Though scientists are uncertain about its animal origins, they also haven’t been able to rule out the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 came from somewhere elsewhere—namely, that it’s an escaped specimen from a lab studying dangerous pathogens.

‘It’s just gotten crazy’: how the origins of Covid became a toxic US political debate

New report supporting theory the coronavirus leaked from a Chinese lab has sparked the latest eruption in a long fight over how the virus started, clouding efforts to pursue a neutral, fact-based inquiry.