He’d also like to see a list of viruses that have been used at the institute over a five-year period. Since the start of the pandemic, he had entertained two possibilities for how it might have begun — either as an escape from a lab or natural transmission from animal to human. But that does not eliminate the possibility that an unmodified virus collected by scientists in the field and brought into a lab could have moved into humans. Robertson said viruses naturally migrate from animals to humans all the time, and SARS-CoV-2 could have been one of them. “We should show the same determination in promoting a dispassionate, science-based discourse on this difficult but important issue,” they wrote.

Source: Los Angeles Times May 13, 2021 19:50 UTC