A vacuum of knowledge about the origins of the new coronavirus ravaging the world has provided fertile ground for all manner of theories — from the fantastic, to the dubious to the believable.
It was a bioweapon manufactured by the Chinese. The US Army brought the virus to Wuhan. It leaked — like a genie out of a bottle — from a lab in an accident. It took root at a wildlife market in Wuhan.
Scientists have banded together across international borders to condemn the nationalist-tinged conspiracy theories. And yet, they are divided on what was once widely thought the most likely culprit: a so-called wet market in Wuhan, where wild animals are kept in cages and sold as pets or food. It is believed that a bat-infected animal — perhaps a pangolin — infected the first human.
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In any case, researchers agree that the coronavirus jumped from an animal to a human, a phenomenon known as “zoonotic spillover.”
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“We’re very confident that the origin of Covid-19 is in bats,” said Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a health nonprofit that tracks zoonotic spillover. “We just don’t know where exactly it originated — which bat species exactly. And we don’t know how many others there are out there that could emerge in the future.”
It is a genetic detective story.
