Details of the research done by a Wuhan lab on viruses closely related to COVID-19, and of the secrecy surrounding it, have grown increasingly hard to dismiss.

The world knows by now the story of the coronavirus: this pathogen that has ripped around the world, killing 2.7m people and counting, leaving devastation in its wake. We are all but certain it came from China. Yet surprisingly, even now, nobody knows how the pandemic began. We were told early on that it started in a Wuhan wet market, possibly via smuggled pangolins, which infected people. Those pangolins had probably caught SARS-CoV-2 from horseshoe bats, which naturally carry such viruses. This was the story initially – and many articles were written on the risks posed by such wet markets. 

But what if the virus that causes Covid-19 jumped from animals into people in a different setting – inside a lab? Specifically one where bat viruses were being studied? There have been rumours about this from the start; at first they seemed like conspiracy theories but as the months have worn on, the original theory – of the wet market and pangolins – has become more questionable. Scientists probing the origins of SARS-CoV-2 have uncovered anomaly after anomaly.