Why the ‘lab-leak’ theory of Covid’s origins has gained prominence again | Stephen Buranyi
Joe Biden wants to know if the coronavirus pandemic originated in a laboratory. On Thursday, the president ordered US intelligence agencies to “redouble” their efforts to find exactly when and how the virus jumped into humans, and the two scenarios he suggested were an infected animal, or a laboratory accident. Just last year, that second utterance would have got a person dismissed as a kook and a conspiracist; but an increasing number of mainstream figures, from those in the press to influential scientists and government officials such as US chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, are at least open to the idea that the pandemic may have started with a containment failure in China, or a souped-up virus experiment gone wrong.
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