Leaders | No more leaks

Regardless of how covid-19 spread, the world needs to prevent lab leaks

Even a small reduction in the risk of another pandemic is worth the price

TO PREVENT THE next pandemic, it would help to know how this one started. However, the answer to that question might embarrass China’s rulers. So they have obstructed investigations into how the virus emerged, and promoted far-fetched theories about it having originated somewhere else. The world thus has only a shaky understanding of what happened in Hubei province in the second half of 2019.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “No more leaks”

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