Lab Leak or Not, Covid’s Mysteries Still Need Solving

News that the US Department of Energy now believes that the virus that causes Covid-19 escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, won’t resolve the ill-tempered debate over how a pandemic that has killed nearly 7 million people began. But it should spur policymakers and scientists to stop politicizing the issue and get serious about preventing another catastrophe.

This latest twist won’t end the mystery of where Covid-19 originated. Energy Department officials didn’t detail what new evidence changed their minds or why they only have “low confidence” in their conclusions. Meanwhile, none of the US intelligence agencies that subscribe to the competing theory — that the virus jumped naturally from animals to humans in a case of zoonotic transmission — have altered their assessments. The World Health Organization seems no closer to rendering a verdict one way or another. It recently suspended its own investigation into the roots of the pandemic because of stonewalling by China.