SARS-CoV-2: Did it escape from the Wuhan Virological Lab? The issue again hots up.

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Sukla Sen

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Jun 15, 2021, 1:46:15 PM6/15/21
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"In theory, COVID-19 could have come from a lab in a few ways. Researchers might have collected SARS-CoV-2 from an animal and maintained it in their lab to study, or they might have created it by engineering coronavirus genomes. In these scenarios, a person in the lab might have then been accidentally or deliberately infected by the virus, and then spread it to others — sparking the pandemic. There is currently no clear evidence to back these scenarios, but they aren’t impossible.

"People have made a number of arguments for a lab origin for SARS-CoV-2 that are currently conjecture."


That's an "explainer" from the prestigious science journal - Nature.

To be sure, the jury is still out.
However, there's, lately, a perceptible mood swing in the experts' community in favour of a "leak" theory after its earlier near-conclusive rejection - mainly, via a published research paper.

The obvious issue that's again bothering us is how did the COVID-19 appear at our doorstep?
Did the causative virus - SARS-CoV-2, escape from a virological lab in Wuhan (deliberately or accidentally) or it came from bats (in the region?) via an intermediary (pangolin?) or directly to humans?
After, having been, more or less, resolved, in favour of the second hypothesis (ref.: <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9>), it has again become a hot-button issue with experts' opinions generally favouring the other alternative possibility.

Some useful links:









The POTUS has asked the American intelligence community to investigate and produce a report by late August: <https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/26/politics/biden-intelligence-community-pandemic-origins-report/index.html>.
That'd, definitely, be of interest.

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