COVID origin Controversy continues amid sketchy data and lack of transparency from Chinese authorities

"It is based on fragmentary information and to a large degree, hearsay," David A. Relman, a professor of microbiology at Stanford University, said in an email after reading an embargoed copy. "In general, there is no way of verifying much of what he describes, and then concludes." Jesse Bloom, a computational biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, said the quality of the data from China on early coronavirus infections is too poor to support any conclusion.