It’s been three years since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Yet the mystery of how it got started continues to make headlines again and again and to fuel a heated, and oft-time political, debate.
While what exactly happened in the earliest days of the pandemic remains an ongoing question, some genetic studies have tipped the scales in favor of the pandemic originating from a viral spillover from animals (SN: 10/4/22). A hypothesis, but no evidence, suggests the virus could have been leaked, either accidentally or deliberately, from a lab.
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U.S. intelligence agencies are split over which scenario they deem more likely. The Department of Energy and the FBI lean more toward the possibility of a lab leak, while the National Intelligence Council and others suspect a natural origin. It is important to note that most of these agencies drew their conclusions with “low confidence,” which means the available data the intelligence community had to rely on is “scant, questionable or very fragmented,” according to the National Intelligence Council.
Very soon, we will see what that intelligence looks like. President Joe Biden signed a bill into law on March 20 to declassify government information on the virus’s origins within 90 days.
Meanwhile, a new genetic analysis adds another piece to the puzzle in favor of the spillover scenario, this time with a possible suspect: raccoon dogs.
“These data do not provide a definitive answer to how the pandemic began,” World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a March 17 news briefing. “But every piece of data is important to moving us closer to that answer.”
Here’s what to know about the latest data and what they…
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