The coronavirus pandemic almost certainly originated from an animal, probably at a wildlife market in China, and not from a laboratory leak, a group of virus experts said Wednesday.
Theories about a lab leak are almost all based on coincidence, not hard evidence, the group of 20 top experts from the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere said.
They had been following discussions -- going all the way to the White House -- about the possibility of a laboratory origin of the virus, and worked together to analyze the evidence.
"I think you can make a pretty strong argument that it didn't leak from a lab," Robert Garry, professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane Medical School and one of the scientists who signed the paper, told CNN.
The experts lay out the published evidence
in a pre-print review posted online.
It is signed by some of the leading experts in coronaviruses and the genetics of viruses, including Kristian Andersen of The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California; evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona; Andrew Rambaut of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh; Stephen Goldstein of the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Utah; Angela Rasmussen of the University of Saskatchewan; Joel Wertheim of the University of California, San Diego; and Jeremy Farrar of Britain's Wellcome Trust.
Many have done their own investigations into the possible origin of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.
"We contend that there is substantial body of scientific evidence supporting a zoonotic (animal) origin for SARS-CoV-2," they wrote.
