America is closer than ever to defeating Covid-19 as half the country’s population has been vaccinated and restrictions are gradually being lifted.

But we still do not know how this dangerous virus, which has shut down the whole world, appeared.

Security personnel guard outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China.

The US is urgently calling for more active research and investigation into the origin of the epidemic, warning of the risk of similar pandemics occurring in the future.

US President Joe Biden said on May 26 that he had directed the intelligence community to increase efforts to investigate the origin of Covid-19 and report back within 90 days.

However, interest in the hypothesis of Covid-19 leaking from a laboratory was heated up when US media recently published previously undisclosed details in a US intelligence report, showing that several researchers

Here are new details about the severity of their symptoms.

Jamie Metzl, an advisor from the World Health Organization (WHO), said viruses can still leak from the laboratory when scientists study them for good purposes such as vaccine development.

`So, I believe there may have been an accidental leak followed by an intentional cover-up,` Metzl said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s leading epidemiologist, also said last week that he did not believe the epidemic formed naturally, and called for further investigation.

An in-depth study conducted by WHO with the Chinese government in March explored the possible origins of Covid-19 and concluded that while it is not yet possible to say how the disease develops, it is likely that it is transmitted.

The report of the WHO expert group to Wuhan to investigate the origin of Covid-19 said that the hypothesis that the virus leaked from the laboratory was `extremely unlikely` and they cited the lack of staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

However, newly released information from US intelligence reports shows that researchers at the Wuhan laboratory fell ill a month earlier.

Furthermore, even as the study was published, WHO officials urged additional investigation and called for more openness from China.

Beijing is still not willing to conduct an open investigation into the origin of Covid-19 and only relies on the conclusions from the WHO study.

A group of prominent scientists with experience in infectious diseases criticized the WHO report for not paying attention to the hypothesis that the virus leaked from a laboratory.

`We must consider both the hypothesis that the virus spreads in nature and from the laboratory seriously until we have complete data,` scientists wrote in the journal Science.

The lack of transparency and openness about the virus origin investigations is also the reason why conspiracy theories flare up.

According to Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease expert at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, despite Chinese officials’ unwillingness to allow a public investigation into the origin of the virus, the world still needs to do it to

`They must allow the investigation,` Offit emphasized.

`I think we needed to know this right from the beginning of the outbreak. I find it unfair that we had to rely on a whistleblower in China to know there was a virus spreading in Wuhan,

Vu Hoang (According to CNN)