Animal spillover? Lab leak? What the science says about the origins of COVID-19 - WBHM
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Fauci spent 38 years leading infectious disease research, yet even he can't settle whether COVID-19 jumped from animals or escaped a lab — and the science still hasn't either.
Zoonotic Spillover TheoryLab Leak HypothesisOccam's RazorBayesian Reasoning
Theory Briefing
- Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022, has long backed the animal-spillover theory for COVID-19's origin.
- The lab-leak theory centers on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the same city where the outbreak began — a geographic coincidence that keeps the debate alive.
- No definitive physical evidence has publicly confirmed either pathway, leaving two competing scientific camps with genuinely different readings of the same data.
- Animal spillover and lab leak are not equally weighted by all agencies — different U.S. intelligence bodies have reached different conclusions from the same evidence.