Opinion: Is the debate over the origin of Covid-19 still worth having?
The American public is understandably interested in how a pandemic that has killed nearly 750,000 people in this country and almost 5 million worldwide — with few signs of slowing down — emerged. But the U.S. intelligence community has now concluded that the precise sequence of events by which SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, entered the human population may never be known. Is there any point to continuing an increasingly fractious debate on the origin of Covid-19, or should we now focus on applying the lessons already learned, and think about the future?
The initial events in the Covid-19 pandemic took place in or near Wuhan, China, in late 2019 when a virus that was likely endemic to bats infected one or more humans and then began to spread from person to person. But did this transmission occur “naturally” when a bat encountered a human, whether in the Wuhan hinterlands or in a “wet market” where wild animals are sold as food? Or did an experimentally manipulated bat virus infect laboratory workers in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and then escape into the local population?
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