Explainer | Lab leak or nature? Debate heats up on the origins of Covid-19 virus

Name: Nature or lab leak? Why tracing the origin of Covid-19 matters
Uploaded: 2021-06-09T13:00:00.000Z
Duration: 5 min 8 s
Description: Nature or lab leak? Why tracing the origin of Covid-19 matters

Calls are growing to investigate whether the pathogen came from a laboratory studying bat viruses in Wuhan

The US president, the WHO chief, and governments across Europe are backing the scientists who want more information

Reading Time:5 minutes

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The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China’s central Hubei province is back in the spotlight as calls grow for a renewed investigation into its possible role in the Covid-19 pandemic. Photo: AFP

Simone McCarthy

Published: 9:00pm, 9 Jun 2021Updated: 3:24pm, 18 Jun 2021

Corrected [3:20pm, 10 Jun, 2021]

[3:20pm, 10 Jun, 2021]
David Robertson is with the University of Glasgow, and not Edinburgh as stated in a previous version of this article.

The virus causing Covid-19 has spread around the globe and killed more than 3.5 million people, but the debate over where it came from has grown ever more heated in recent weeks as scientists clash over competing theories and governments stake out positions on what to do next.

At the heart of the controversy is whether the pathogen could have come from a laboratory studying bat viruses in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the first known outbreak occurred.

A World Health Organization-backed team of international and Chinese scientists all but ruled out a lab connection for Covid-19. Their report, released in March, favoured a hypothesis that the virus known as Sars-CoV-2, thought to originate in a bat, infected an unknown intermediary animal before jumping to humans.

Nevertheless, in recent months the head of the WHO, the president of the United States, governments across Europe, and a number of scientists have all called for investigations into the possibility that the virus could have escaped from a lab in Wuhan.

The White House last month gave intelligence agencies 90 days to evaluate the lab accident and natural origin theories.

05:08

Nature or lab leak? Why tracing the origin of Covid-19 matters

“As long as we have this question mark, all the theories stay on the table, unless you can prove one,” said Wanda Markotter, a virologist and the director of the Centre for Viral Zoonoses at South Africa’s University of Pretoria.

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