The Mystery of the Origins of the Pandemic: Can It Be Solved?
It's still a mystery. How did the pandemic begin?
There is the leading hypothesis among scientists: The virus hopped from an animal — possibly a bat — to a human, or to some other animal, which later spread the disease to humans.
And then there is the lab leak hypothesis: The virus somehow escaped from the Wuhan Virology Institute.
The debate over the origins is now burning hot, with increasing demand for an international investigation into the possibility of a lab leak. Media reports have fanned speculation, much of it based on circumstantial evidence like the cluster of illnesses among lab workers at the Wuhan lab, first reported on May 23 by The Wall Street Journal but denied by Shi Zhengli, a top scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in an interview with The New York Times this week.
At the G7 summit last weekend, the U.S. and its allies called for a "timely, transparent, expert-led and science-based" study of how the virus first emerged. And World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has reiterated that China should be more forthcoming.
