The Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province. Credit: Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images.
On Thursday, President Joe Biden told the country that fully vaccinated people no longer need to wear masks indoors or outdoors, calling it a “great day.” The federal government’s new policy, along with falling case counts and increasing vaccination numbers, was another sign that the crisis phase of the pandemic—in the United States at least—was drawing to a close. On the same day that Biden looked toward the pandemic’s end, a group of 18 prominent scientists looked, figuratively, in the opposite direction, toward how it all began. In a letter in