US COVID-Origins Hearing Renews Debate over Lab-Leak Hypothesis

The US House of Representatives held the first in a series of public hearings aimed at exploring how the COVID-19 pandemic began. Members of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic acknowledged that the question of where the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus originated has become highly politicized. But they said that both hypotheses describing its emergence — one, that it spread naturally from animals to people; the other, that it leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — must be explored.