(New York Times) – As China and the United States trade charges of a lab leak, researchers contend in a new paper that the Covid pandemic got its start, like a previous one, in the wildlife trade.

In a study published on Wednesday, a team of researchers compared the evolutionary story of SARS with that of Covid 17 years later. The researchers analyzed the genomes of the two coronaviruses that caused the pandemics, along with 248 related coronaviruses in bats and other mammals.

Jonathan Pekar, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Edinburgh and an author of the new study, said that the histories of the two coronaviruses followed parallel paths. “In my mind, they are extraordinarily similar,” he said. (Read More)