Comment by Peter Daszak

I’ll repeat myself again; the evidence for the lab leak is innuendo, supposition about motives and out-of-context quotes from private emails purposefully amplified to arouse reaction and fears. A scientist can’t say with 100 percent certainty that something is impossible because you can never prove a negative. What you can say is that a lab leak origin for COVID should be treated like any other hypothesis that is extremely unlikely and probably unprovable—it should not be a basis for policy. [...] The lab leak was extremely unlikely then, it has been all along, and it likely always will be. The emergence from the wildlife market is the essential conclusion and every piece of new evidence that has been gathered since that investigation supports that very concrete conclusion.