Where did Covid-19 start?

This isn't going to help people trust the scientists.

From an Intercept email:

The closest relative of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is a virus found in bats. So how did it jump to humans?

Many scientists believe that the virus passed to humans through natural spillover, making the jump in a setting such as a wet market or rural area where humans and animals are in close contact.

But by suing the National Institutes of Health under the Freedom of Information Act, The Intercept has uncovered explosive documents that are bringing renewed attention to the lab-leak theory, which posits that the virus may have escaped from a lab, possibly as part of research funded in part by the U.S. government.

These documents do not provide “smoking gun” evidence of a lab leak. But they show what one expert called “exactly the scenario imagined by many lab-leak scenario proponents” occurring in a Wuhan lab, with scientists intentionally making coronaviruses more dangerous in order to study them.

The records uncovered by The Intercept provide evidence that the NIH has funded this controversial “gain-of-function” research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — challenging the accuracy of denials by Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The U.S. government resisted releasing these documents, which raise questions about the NIH’s previous claims about coronavirus research. But the public has a right to know what kind of experiments the U.S. has funded and whether they could have led to this pandemic — and if the government is still funding risky research that could lead to future pandemics.

Our reporters interviewed 11 scientists for their article, taking care to reach out to experts with a range of views on this complex issue. The scientists were unanimous on one point: The specific experiment funded by the NIH described in these documents could not have led to the pandemic, because the viruses being studied were not closely enough related to the virus that causes Covid-19. However, the fact that this unpublished research was going on raises serious questions about whether other activities at the Wuhan lab could be linked to the pandemic — and about what has not yet been disclosed.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.