David Quammen is a science journalist and author. His most recent book is “Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus.”
Earlier this month, the pendulum of persuasion on the origin of the coronavirus pandemic swung again. An international team of scientists, including some of the world’s most trusted experts on virus evolution, released an analysis of genetic evidence, some viral, some animal, extracted from swabs of surfaces at Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market in early 2020. Their report on the data — previously unpublished genomic sequences, which turned up on a public online data platform and then were abruptly removed — casts suspicion on one particular wild animal as an intermediate host of the virus, a link between its inferred natural source in bats and its entry into humans: the raccoon dog.
