The Washington Post reports:
An international team of scientists published a peer-reviewed paper Thursday saying genetic evidence indicates the coronavirus pandemic most likely originated with a natural spillover from an animal or animals sold in a market in Wuhan, China, where many of the first human cases of covid-19 were identified. The paper, which appears in the journal Cell, does not claim to prove conclusively that the pandemic began in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and it is unlikely to end the acrimonious and politicized debate over the coronavirus’s origin… “The results we see are consistent with infected animals, but we cannot prove that they were,” said Florence Débarre, an evolutionary biologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research and a co-author of the new paper…
Many of the 23 authors of the paper are known to have long supported a market origin for the virus. In an informal report