The origin of the novel coronavirus continues to be unclear and the idea that it was brought on by a laboratory leak must be taken critically till there’s a rigorous data-led investigation that proves it flawed, a gaggle of main scientists stated.
COVID-19, which emerged in China in late 2019, has killed 3.34 million folks, value the world trillions of {dollars} in misplaced revenue and upended regular life for billions of individuals.
“More investigation continues to be wanted to find out the origin of the pandemic,” said the 18 scientists, including Ravindra Gupta, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Cambridge, and Jesse Bloom, who studies the evolution of viruses at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
“Theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable,” the scientists together with David Relman, professor of microbiology at Stanford, stated in a letter to the journal Science. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
The authors of the letter stated the World Health Organization’s investigation into the origins of the virus had not made a “balanced consideration” of the theory that it may have come from a laboratory incident.
In its final report, written jointly with Chinese scientists, a WHO-led team that spent four weeks in and around Wuhan in January and February said the virus had probably been transmitted from bats to humans through another animal, and that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely” as a trigger.
But there are myriad completely different concepts concerning the origin of the virus together with a collection of conspiracy theories.
“We should take hypotheses about each pure and laboratory spillovers critically till we now have adequate information,” the scientists said, adding that an intellectually rigorous and dispassionate investigation needed to take place.
“In this time of unfortunate anti-Asian sentiment in some countries, we note that at the beginning of the pandemic, it was Chinese doctors, scientists, journalists, and citizens who shared with the world crucial information about the spread of the virus—often at great personal cost.”
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