Before one year, the idea that the coronavirus pandemic could have been caused by a laboratory accident was denounced as a conspiracy theory by the world’s leading journals, scientists, and news organizations. But the origin of the virus that has killed millions remains a mystery, and the chance that it came from a lab has become the theory that cannot be put to rest.

Now, in a letter in the journal Science, 18 prominent biologists, including the world’s foremost coronavirus researcher, are lending their weight to calls for a new investigation of all possible origins of the virus, and calling on China’s laboratories and agencies to “open their records” to independent analysis. “We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data,” the scientists write.

"Knowing how Covid-19 emerged is critical for informing global strategies to mitigate the risk of future outbreaks," said the researchers led by Jesse Bloom, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Washington, US.

The Coronavirus disease, which was first documented on December 1, 2019, from Wuhan City in China, has since spread like wildfire throughout the globe. The overall global Covid-19 caseload has topped 160.8 million, while the deaths have surged to more than 3.34 million, so far.

The researchers highlighted a joint China-World Health Organization (WHO) report into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, some results of which were released in November 2020.

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