The idea of a laboratory escape has polarised the community and was dismissed by the World Health OrganisationIt remains plausible that the pandemic started after the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory, a group of leading scientists has said. In a letter in the journal Science, researchers from Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Cambridge criticised the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other scientists for dismissing such an explanation. SponsoredThey said that despite vociferous opposition from some colleagues there was not enough data to exclude the possibility the virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The idea of a laboratory escape has polarised the community. A WHO investigation concluded it was “extremely unlikely”, arguing it was far more possible that it came naturally as “zoonotic spillover” from animals

Source: The Times May 13, 2021 22:52 UTC