This is the Guardian.

Today, why the search for the origins of COVID isn't just a question of science?

It might just be the biggest mystery in the world, three years since it sent us all into lockdown.

Where did COVID-19 come from?

Earlier this month, Dr. Florence Debare, an evolutionary biologist, was working on the answer.

It was a Saturday afternoon.

I have a bad work life balance.

I was looking for information about a sequence that had been shared on the Gisett database.

And I had more results that appeared than usual.

So that's the first step when I realised that something was up.

What was up were thousands of pieces of raw genetic data that appeared to have come from the Huenan seafood market in Wuhan

in the early days of a pandemic that would go on to kill nearly 7 million people.

This crucial information was uploaded quietly without any announcement on a scientific database.

Chinese government scientists had had this data for three years, and they had told the world there was nothing in it

to suggest an animal at the market might have been responsible for COVID jumping into human populations.

But when flow and her colleagues analysed the same data, they got a different result.

It's just racondag racondag racondag racondag racondag. And that was amazing.

We're still a really long way from the answer to where COVID came from.

But while Deborah's discovery was a breakthrough in solving one mystery, it's led to others.

A day after she and her team told the Chinese scientists behind the data that they had found racondag DNA at the market,

the files vanished from view.

I wish I could, but I was not surprised.

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