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On a Thursday morning in September, members of The Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission gathered for a virtual press conference to announce the findings of their two-year investigation into all things pandemic related. Leading it was Jeffrey Sachs, the world-renowned economist who chaired the commission. After a short opening statement, he dove into a summary of the group’s 57-page final report, starting at as natural a place as any: the beginning.
“We do not know where SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused this pandemic, came from. Some scientists surmise that it came from a marketplace. Many scientists are worried that it came out of a laboratory through work that was underway on SARS-like viruses,” Sachs said. “Both hypotheses are viable. Neither has been disproved.”
To most people watching, Sachs’s remark was a simple statement of fact. Three years after the earliest reports of COVID-19, few scientists will entirely rule out either theory absent conclusive evidence, which may be impossible to find given China’s initial cover-up. But the mere mention of origins irritated a number of people because, exactly one year earlier, Sachs had unilaterally disbanded a task force within The Lancet commission dedicated to studying COVID’s origins, accusing members of hiding what he believed were conflicts of interest — the nature of their research before the pandemic and their connections to the Wuhan research institute many suspect to have accidentally leaked the virus.