You're listening to shortwave from NPR.

Hey everybody, Emily Quonk here, and today I'm joined by senior science editor and correspondent

Jeff Brumfield.

Hey Jeff.

Hi there.

So a few weeks ago, I reported on how virus hunters were able to trace the coronavirus

to bats.

But there's still this big unanswered question, which is how did the virus jump from bats

or another intermediate animal to humans?

Right.

So you may remember back in January, we heard

many of the earliest COVID-19 patients were connected to a seafood market in the Chinese

city of Wuhan.

But there's no evidence confirming that's where the virus got started.

And in fact, some of the earliest clinical patients had no connection to the market at

all.

And last month, the Trump administration began exploring various theories.

There's a lot of theories, but yeah, we have people looking at it very, very strongly.

And the theory that President Trump has really landed on is this idea that the virus

was released through a laboratory accident that somehow a virus sample collected in nature

later infected a person in a lab in Wuhan and then got out to the general population.

Now there are a lot of problems with this theory, as we will discuss, but Trump when asked

...