The US report into Covid’s origins is little use in averting another pandemic | Laura Spinney

Regardless of where the virus came from, there's a growing risk of another Covid-like phenomenon occurring

US intelligence services have just briefed the president, Joe Biden, on the results of their 90-day investigation into the origins of Covid-19. They were asked to test two hypotheses: that it had a natural" origin, or that it escaped from a lab. Preliminary reports suggest that their findings are inconclusive.

Few scientists will be surprised by this, and yet the investigation has been the subject of intense - and intensely divisive - political and media interest over the past three months. The White House has promised more detail, which could be illuminating, especially if it reveals the genetic sequences of viruses related to the one that causes Covid-19, Sars-CoV-2, that were being studied in labs in Wuhan in 2019. But that won't change the fact that two investigations down, we're still in the dark as to how this pandemic started.