Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.
President Joe Biden today joined a growing chorus of voices calling, yet again, for a fuller, more transparent investigation into whether the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Biden outlined steps the United States would take to try to resolve the question, apparently even if China declines to allow a more thorough investigation of the scenario than a World Health Organization (WHO) team conducted earlier this year. The president’s move came as several top federal scientists testified at a Senate hearing this morning that the lab-leak hypothesis was a credible explanation for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2, although less likely than a competing scenario in which the virus spilled over from wild or domesticated animals into people.