With the highly transmissible Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 detected in some 65 countries, infections are likely to remain a problem, at least for the near term. There are also concerns that another variant, called Mu, already being tracked by the World Health Organization (WHO), may evade the immunity provided by a previous SARS-CoV-2 infection or the current vaccines against the coronavirus. A better understanding of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 might help lessen the effects of the next novel

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... that will confront the US and other parts of the world. According to the WHO COVID-19 dashboard, there were 217 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 4.5 million deaths worldwide as of August 30, 2021. 1 To put the US losses in an economic perspective, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the country's unemployment rate jumped from 3.5% in February 2020, a half-century low, to 14.8% in April-the highest since statistics started to be collected in 1948-and the rate was 5.4% in July 2021. The labor force participation rate-which measures the percentage of the population working or actively looking for work-was 61.7% in July 2021, 1.7 percentage points below the rate in January 2020, another indication that the economy is still being affected by COVID-19. Given the enormity of the economic loss in the US and around the world-compounded by the enormous loss of life-the attention being given to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 is not surprising. The WHO released a report 2 in March 2021 written by a group of independent international members of a joint WHO-China team, discussing what was then known about SARS-CoV-2's origins. A theory that SARS-CoV-2 might have been accidentally leaked from a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had not been a part of the original "terms of reference" for the investigation.