The COVID-19 pandemic stemmed from separate instances in which the virus spilled over from live animals to human beings at a seafood market in Wuhan, China, according to new reports.
The theory that the pandemic originated naturally has long been debated among scientists, as some questioned whether the virus occurred naturally or leaked from a lab located in China. Although evidence largely points to a natural origin of the pandemic, scientists acknowledged in two new reports their support for the market theory, adding there are still several unanswered questions.
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“Everything upstream of this — which animals, where did they come from, how it’s all connected — is completely unknown at this stage,” Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at Scripps Research, told reporters Tuesday. “Have we disproven the lab leak theory? No, we have not. Will we ever be able to? No. But there are ‘possible’ scenarios, and there are ‘plausible’ scenarios. … ‘Possible’ does not mean equally likely.”
The theory that the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, emerged early on in the pandemic, with many shifting the blame to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which studies coronaviruses. This theory is supported by evidence showing a cluster of the earliest COVID-19 cases had occurred around the market, according to recent reports.
The notion that COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab was initially dismissed as a conspiracy theory by several high-profile scientists and politicians, and scientists who worked there say they never worked with that virus. The theory was also shut down by Dr. Anthony Fauci early on in the pandemic despite privately acknowledging it was possible or even likely, according to emails revealed in January.
The origins of the COVID-19 pandemic have been under investigation for well over a year after the journal Science published a letter in May 2021 signed by 18 leading scientists calling for an investigation. Shortly after, President Joe Biden also called on U.S. intelligence agencies to explore the possible origins of the virus.
That review concluded COVID-19 was not intentionally created as a bioweapon, but it did not determine where the virus originated.
The most recent reports analyze geographical data about where the earliest cases cropped up, showing most infections were near the location of the market in “an insane bull’s eye” pattern, according to Michael Worobey, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Arizona.
“The virus started spreading in people who worked at the market, but then started spreading in the surrounding local community as vendors went to local shops, and infected people who worked in those shops,” Worobey told the Washington Post.
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In one of the newly released scientific reports detailing the origins of the pandemic, data suggest the coronavirus spread into the human population several times in late 2019 at the Wuhan market.
The new studies do not prove one theory over another, and the findings have prompted some scientists to call for similar reports analyzing the lab leak theory.
