The key thing to know about the Atlantic story headlined, “The Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic,” is that the headline might be literally true, but the evidence isn’t very strong. The news is that some samples from the market were positive for Covid and contained raccoon-dog genetic material as well. This presumably places raccoon dogs at the market, but does not, as some people have carelessly assumed, mean there is evidence that raccoon dogs were infected. Evidence is so sparse in the origins debate that any new information should be welcome, so long as it isn’t hyped and misrepresented.

I was going to write at greater length about this, but it’s complicated:

And there’s possibly a lot of scientific intrigue involved:

So, I backed off and decided to be content hoping that maybe Jim Geraghty would take up the question in a Morning Jolt (although it looks like next week is going to be, ahem, a target-rich news environment).