Where and when the Covid-19 pandemic began — in Wuhan, China in late 2019 — is well known. How it began is a matter of heated controversy. There are two competing hypotheses, one of which is hindering ...

Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli (L) is seen inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan in this 2017 photo. The P4 epidemiological laboratory, part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is one of the world's ...

A corollary to the scientific truism that “nature abhors a vacuum” is that nature tends to fill the void with any garbage near at hand. For example, consider the surge of interest in the claim that ...

“If all of mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would ...

As we sift through the lab-leak debacle, the good news is that the healthy antibodies in the system are still strong enough to overcome the groupthink that produced ...

Security personnel stand guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan as members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus make a ...

The exact origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, still remains a mystery. Some people think this makes all possible origin stories equally probable. It does not. Facts about the virus ...

Imagine yourself, if you can, in the months before the Covid-19 pandemic. Imagine being told then that a novel virus would emerge in China that would then spread around the world, infecting much of ...

In an open letter published Thursday in Science, a group of 18 scientists called for a new investigation into the origin of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, arguing that “theories of accidental ...

Republican legislators are eager to get to work evening the score with Democrats. On their proposed agenda is a delightfully delusional plan to investigate the “lab-leak hypothesis” related to the ...

Last summer, Michael Imperiale, a University of Michigan virologist and 10-year member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, published an essay on the need to “rethink” some basic ...