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The US House of Representatives held the first in a series of public hearings on 8 March aimed at exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic began. Members of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic acknowledged that the question of where the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus originated has become highly politicized. But they said that both hypotheses describing its emergence — one, that it spread naturally from animals to people; the other, that it leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — must be explored. “This question is…

Intelligence reports have a checkered history. They have recently seized center stage in the debate over the origin of the pandemic virus. With a change of mind at the Department of Energy, and a mere restatement of position at the FBI, those arguing that the SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology are pressing their case. Most agencies still favor the natural route or say they don’t know. This latest twist comes courtesy of an update to a 90-day intelligence agency review that President…

The mysterious origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, like so many aspects of the response to it, has created deep divides along party lines in the United States. Today, the Republican minority staff of a bipartisan Senate committee set up to probe the origin of SARS-CoV-2 issued an “interim report” arguing for the narrative that the virus entered humans because of a lab-related incident and not a natural jump from animals to humans. Many virologists and evolutionary…