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The theory that the virus responsible for COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese government lab has fallen off the front pages in recent months, but research into the virus' origin has continued -- and it's making the lab-leak theory look more unlikely.

Recent scientific papers give more credence to "zoonotic" origin of the virus -- that is that it spread to humans from animal hosts, not through artificial means.

That's the basis of a paper by researchers in China and at the University of Glasgow published in Science on Aug. 21, exploring "the animal origin of SARS-CoV-2," the virus causing the pandemic.

There's substantially more evidence on the side of a natural origin compared to a lab leak.

"There is currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a laboratory origin," bluntly concludes a separate paper coauthored by 21 virologists from the U.S., Canada, Britain, China, Australia and Austria and scheduled for publication in the Sept. 16 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Cell.

That paper attributes the suspicion that the virus might have originated in a lab to "the coincidence that it was first detected in a city that houses a major virological laboratory," the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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But the authors observe that "Wuhan is the largest city in central China with multiple animal markets and is a major hub for travel and commerce," making it more likely that the virus reached humans from animal hosts, such as raccoon dogs and civets, known to be vulnerable to the infection and known to have been sold in a major Wuhan market at the time COVID-19 was first identified in humans.

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