Geopolitical tensions are hindering efforts to find out how COVID-19 came to be.
Why it matters: Understanding how COVID-19 started can help us prevent future pandemics, especially when it comes to a leak or accident in a virology lab.
Driving the news: Findings from a WHO-led mission to Wuhan, China earlier this year to investigate the origins of COVID-19 are expected in mid-March, health agency officials said at a news conference Friday, after plans for an interim report were announced. . apparently demolished.
Context: The WHO team faced international criticism when its members concluded at a press conference at the end of their trip that a laboratory accident was “extremely unlikely,” while remaining open to the possibility – promoted by Beijing – that the virus might have come from elsewhere and in had come into contact with China through contaminated frozen food.
Be smart: The most likely explanation still remains the simplest: the coronavirus sprang from an animal host in China to humans, the kind of zoonotic spillover seen in countless other emerging outbreaks.
- But a pandemic threat from lab leaks is real, and as our ability to manipulate viruses grows, so will that danger.
- While we are limited in our ability to prevent zoonotic spillovers, we can and should be able to do much more to monitor and regulate the kind of research that could lead to the inadvertent introduction of a new virus.
It comes down to: Without much better transparency, we’ll probably never know for sure how COVID-19 started – and what steps to take to prevent it from happening again.