As a microbiologist and infectious disease clinician, it has been tough to watch the recent devolution of public discourse on Covid-19 origins. It has been especially difficult for me to read the comments of Anthony Fauci about the origins debate in his now-public diary. And it has been painful to watch the televised spectacle hosted by the US senator Rand Paul on 29 July involving a hostile interrogation of Fauci.

Despite many early pleas, including my own, for a dispassionate, objective assessment of what we know, don’t know and need to know about Covid-19 origins, we seem to be even further from this goal now than we have ever been – plagued by politicization, polarization and illogical thinking.

Much is at stake: trust in science, scientists and government, not to mention our ability to thwart and respond to the next pandemic. How did this happen and how do we dig ourselves out?

By the eve of Covid-19, after 20 years of debate, we had agreed to disagree about whether humans were capable of starting a new pandemic. Most public health scientists believed that nature was the only important “bioterrorist”, based simply on prior........

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