The pandemic has cost the lives of at least an estimated 3.5 million people worldwide. The end of this humanitarian disaster is at last foreseeable because of the ingenuity of scientists in devising vaccines. To guard against still deadlier mutations in the virus and prepare for future pandemics, it is vital that researchers understand the origins of Covid-19. That question remains unresolved, and the lack of openness of China’s authorities is proving a stubborn impediment to answering it.
The coronavirus was initially assumed by scientists to have originated in the wet market in Wuhan, but even that conclusion remains provisional. The question has gained renewed impetus from speculation that the virus leaked instead from the city’s Virology Institute. The theory is unsubstantiated but it has
