A new team of about 20 scientists—including specialists in laboratory safety and biosecurity and geneticists and animal-disease experts versed in how viruses spill over from nature—is being assembled with a mandate to hunt for new evidence in China and elsewhere.

Washington and its allies have been urging the WHO, the United Nations’ public-health arm, to push ahead with a probe. China has resisted, arguing that any new inquiry should focus on other countries, including the U.S.

The possibilities that the new team is charged with examining include whether the Covid-19 virus could have emerged from a lab, according to WHO officials, a hypothesis that has especially angered China.

The new effort comes months after another WHO-led inquiry visited Wuhan, the Chinese city that was the site of the first confirmed Covid-19 outbreak in December 2019. In a final report, the team said the data provided by Chinese scientists during the mission was insufficient to answer the critical questions of when, where and how the virus began spreading.

Source: The Wall Street Journal