Unlocking the mysteries of the exact origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 and launched a global pandemic in March 2020, has become one of the most burning questions in the scientific community. But the effort, like so many other coronavirus-related issues, has become hotly contested, fraught with implications for international relations and, in the United States at least, laced with conspiracy theories and politically motivated posturing.
Roiling controversy
This story would not be complete without mention of two pieces of federal intelligence: a US State Department Fact sheet, published on January 15, 2021, in the last week of the Trump administration, that noted the federal government believed that there were sick researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology before the first clusters of Covid-19 cases were identified; and a classified May 2020 report from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory acknowledging that the lab-leak theory was a possibility.
And there’s more: The continued pushback by 14 governments, including the US, on the results of a WHO fact-finding mission to China in early 2021, that found the lab-leak theory is “extremely unlikely” — pushback because of a lack of transparency by the Chinese government while the WHO’s delegation was conducting its research in China. That research was essentially limited to conversations with doctors and workers at the Wuhan lab, with limited access to data and samples, WHO now admits.
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