The unsettled debate about Covid origins

On December 31, 2019, a notice about an unusual pneumonia cluster in Wuhan, China made its way to the WHO's disease surveillance system.

In that moment, the world stood at a crossroads, though we wouldn't know that until the opportunity slipped past our fingers. What followed in those crucial three months was a cascade of fatal delays.

As mysterious pneumonia filled Wuhan's hospitals, Beijing worked to suppress the truth. Even as genetic sequencing revealed a novel coronavirus -- cousin to SARS and MERS -- officials maintained their fiction of "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" until mid-January.