Michael Hiltzik: A new research paper adds to the evidence that COVID-19 came from animals, not a Chinese lab
A new peer-reviewed research paper points to the likelihood that the COVID-19 pandemic originated at a seafood and wildlife market in Wuhan, China, rather than from a Chinese laboratory studying bat viruses.
The paper, by University of Arizona evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey, supports the consensus among virology experts that the pandemic's origin was natural â that the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19 spread via contacts between humans and animals, first from bats, then to intermediate mammalian species, and then to humans. Worobey's report was published Thursday in the journal Science.
Worobey's finding that the earliest identified COVID-19 cases centered around the Huanan Market in central Wuhan, the teeming metropolis where the outbreak apparently originated, "takes the lab-leak idea almost completely off the table," he told me.
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