This “cold chain” theory could cast the origin, and the blame, far beyond China’s borders. Chinese researchers have found ways to suggest that covid-19 started in Italy or that it arrived in Wuhan on frozen meat. China, meanwhile, has sought opportunities to spread responsibility. Since last spring, the hunt for the origin of what former president Donald Trump called the “China virus” has been in the crossfire of US-China trade battles and American charges that the WHO has played patsy for Beijing. What’s certain is that the research to find the pandemic’s cause is politically charged because of the way it could assign blame for the global disaster. They suspect that covid-19 is the result of an accidental leak from the lab. These people point to a striking coincidence: the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the world epicenter of research on dangerous SARS-like bat coronaviruses, to which SARS-CoV-2 is related, is in the same city where the pandemic first broke loose. One Chinese company, Sinovac Biotech, actually dusted off a 16-year-old vaccine design it had shelved after the SARS outbreak was contained.īut some fear that all the research into bat viruses may have backfired in a shocking way. That knowledge is what turbocharged the development process for vaccines against the new coronavirus in early 2020. After the 2003 SARS outbreak, researchers started building up a big knowledge base about this type of virus. We know that the payoffs of origin hunting are real.

Learning how the pandemic began could help health experts avert the next one, or at least react more swiftly. The virus may well be establishing itself in new species, like wild rabbits or even house pets.

It’s important to know how the pandemic started, because after killing more than 2.5 million people and causing trillions of dollars in economic losses, it’s not over. No one has found a “direct progenitor” of the virus, he says, and therefore the pandemic “ remains an unsolved mystery.” Politics at play That’s despite efforts by China to test tens of thousands of animals, including pigs, goats, and geese, according to Liang Wannian, who leads the Chinese side of the research team. More than a year after covid-19 began, no food animal has been identified as a reservoir for the pandemic virus.

This time, though, the intermediate-host hypothesis has one big problem.

Coronavirus origin