evidence: These analyses add weight to original suspicions that the pandemic began at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which many of the people who were infected earliest with SARS-CoV-2 had visited. The preprints contain genetic analyses of coronavirus samples collected from the market and from people infected in December 2019 and January 2020, as well as geolocation analyses connecting these samples to a section of the market where live animals were sold. Taken together, these different lines of evidence point towards the market as the source of the outbreak—much like animal markets were ground zero for the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2002–2004—says Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and an author on two of the reports. "This is extremely strong evidence," he says. [...] Over the past year, Michael Worobey, a virologist at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, and an author on the papers with Andersen says that his thinking on the origins of COVID-19 has shifted. Back in May 2021, he led a letter published in Science in which he and other researchers pressed the scientific community to keep an open mind about whether the pandemic stemmed from a laboratory, a controversial hypothesis suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 was either created in a lab, or was accidentally or intentionally released by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. "You want to take this kind of thing seriously," he explains.