Will we ever know where covid-19 came from?

“Simply preposterous,” said Anthony Fauci, responding in a US congressional hearing to one more in a long line of allegations that he had caused the covid-19 pandemic by funding research that may have created the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

“Mr Fauci,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far right Republican representative from Georgia, at the same hearing, “we should be writing a criminal referral because you should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity . . . You belong in prison.” She emphasised her refusal to address Fauci, the former director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as “Dr” because, in her opinion, he did not deserve the title.

This was the latest in a long line of questioning at the Republican controlled Congress investigating the US government’s response to covid-19 and where SARS-CoV-2 came from.1 The session in June, the 27th in a 15 month period, restoked flames of contention over the virus’s origins.

For the past four years experts and politicians have been, at times very publicly, in a war of words over the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (box 1). The arguments have left the public—eager to forget the limits put on personal freedoms at the outset of the pandemic but still searching for a scapegoat—confused. Years after lockdowns, masking, social distancing, and vaccination became polarising issues for Republicans and Democrats, the response to the pandemic remains a political issue in the US—not least in a presidential election year.