Investigating the Origin of COVID-19
In May 2020, the World Health Assembly requested that the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) work closely with partners to identify the origins of SARS-CoV-2 In November, the terms of reference for a joint China-WHO study were announced. Information, data and samples for the first phase of the study were collected and summarized by the Chinese half of the team. The other members of the team built upon this analysis. Although there were no findings that clearly supported natural spillover effects or laboratory incidents, the team rated zoonotic spillover effects from intermediate hosts as "highly likely" and laboratory incidents as "highly unlikely.
The authors are Jesse D. Bloom, YUJIA ARENA CHANG, Ralph S. BARIC, Pamela J. Bjorkman, Sarah COBEY, Benjamin E. DEVERMAN, David N. FISMAN, Ravindra Gupta, Akiko IWASAKI, Marc LIPSITCH, Ruslan MEDITOBH, Richard A. NEHER, and R. A. NEHER. Richard A. NEHER, RASMUS NIELSEN, NICK PATTERSON, TIM STEARNS, ERIK VAN NIMWEGEN, MICHAEL WOROBEY, DAVID A. RELMAN
Science May 14, 2021 : 694
Impressions
In this text, it was stated that the theory of zoonotic spillover effect was "very likely" without being able to prove the hypothesis against the "spontaneous generation theory" and the "failed experiment theory".
Since the author is not a journalist, he has no means to pursue these issues, so we can only wait for further research results to be published.
