President Biden and some scientists are demanding an investigation into the lab leak theory, a hypothesis that the origin of coronavirus was a virology lab in Wuhan, China.
Alina Chan isn't saying the coronavirus definitely leaked from a lab in China. What she is saying is what more scientists have grown comfortable discussing publicly: There's no clear evidence either way.
The researchers offered near-uniform summations that few conclusions can be drawn based on the available scientific evidence, but they noted that the context and circumstances of the origin debate have changed, particularly as critics point out that China hasn't been fully transparent about the earliest days of the pandemic.
"There has been no new evidence over the past 16 months that the virus had a lab origin," said Maciej Boni, an associate professor of biology at Penn State University, who specializes in tropical disease epidemiology and viral evolution.A number of theories about how the virus may have emerged have been thrown out.
At the heart of those suspicions is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research facility founded in the 1950s that was the first in China to receive the highest level of biosafety clearance. The institute's lab has a biosafety level of 4 , meaning it is equipped to study the world's highest-risk infectious agents and toxins, those that require the strictest biocontainment measures.
Boni said it's still more likely that the virus passed from an animal, such as a bat, into humans. He said his experiences conducting field epidemiology work on avian influenza in Vietnam from 2008 to 2016 showed how close contact with wildlife, such as in "wet markets" around the world where outdoor stalls sell meat, seafood and live animals for consumption, can create easy opportunities for pathogens to spill into human populations.
Chan and 17 other scientists, including Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; David Relman, a microbiologist at Stanford University; and Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, signed the letter in Science in response to the shortcomings of the WHO report.
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