The history of COVID-19 is unclear. Even now, three years after the pandemic first appeared, nobody knows for sure whether the coronavirus responsible for it escaped from a laboratory or jumped from animals to humans.
What is certain is that false information regarding COVID-19 has been reverberating ever since the pandemic began, and that any fresh revelation on the virus’s origin would rapidly provoke a relapse and the reappearance of erroneous statements about the virus, vaccinations, and masks.
The Energy Department revealed last week that the virus escaped once again after a confidential assessment found, with low confidence, that it originated in a laboratory. After the confidential report was released, there was an immediate uptick in internet discussions about COVID-19 conspiracy theories, with many users claiming the evidence proved their hypotheses to be correct.
The analysis from the Energy Department is not conclusive, but it is the most recent of several attempts by scientists and officials to pinpoint where the virus, which has killed almost 7 million people since it was first spotted in the central China city of Wuhan in late 2019, originated.
