We have bigger problems than COVID-19 ’s origins

It doesn’t take consensus on this pandemic covid-19 to prepare for the next one.

As the COVID-19 pandemic scales down in the United States, debates around the origins of the virus — and speculations that it came from a lab in China, not an animal — rumbled back to life. And they’re diverting attention to the wrong places. Focusing on where the virus came from is a distraction from the rest of the urgent ufabet work governments and health agencies around the world need to do in order to end this pandemic and prepare for the next one. We don’t need a consensus on the origins of COVID-19 in order to take steps to strengthen global public health.

That doesn’t mean finding out where the coronavirus came from isn’t important. It’s one of the pieces of information that could give us tools to prevent a similar situation from happening again. Saying that the coronavirus came from a lab rather than an animal is an extraordinary claim; it would require extraordinary evidence to be proven true. Both scenarios are still technically possible, even if a lab leak is far less likely. And there are serious scientists who are calling for a serious investigation.

Taking a methodical, dispassionate approach to tracking the origins of the coronavirus could take many times longer than Biden’s proposed 90 days, assuming there’s ever conclusive proof at all. It took around 14 years to figure out where the SARS virus came from. Tracing the origins of the 1918 flu pandemic took decades. Scientists still don’t know where Ebola outbreaks come from.

There are other things we could focus on that might not take quite as long and can provide sure results. Countries like the US could double down on efforts to distribute life-saving COVID-19 vaccines to poorer countries.