Democracy Dies in Darkness

The weighted politics of the debate over covid-19 origins

Analysis by
National columnist
February 27, 2023 at 3:49 p.m. EST
The Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province. (Dake Kang/AP)
8 min

There are two primary theories for how the coronavirus that causes covid-19 first infected humans.

The first is that it was transmitted from an animal to a human, perhaps (or most likely) at a market in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The other holds that the virus infected an employee at the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology and spread from there.