PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Marta Canuti AU - Silvia Bianchi AU - Otto Kolbl AU - Sergei L Kosakovsky Pond AU - Sudhir Kumar AU - Maria Gori AU - Clara Fappani AU - Daniela Colzani AU - Elisa Borghi AU - Gianvincenzo Zuccotti AU - Mario C Raviglione AU - Elisabetta Tanzi AU - Antonella Amendola TI - Waiting for the truth: is reluctance in accepting an early origin hypothesis for SARS-CoV-2 delaying our understanding of viral emergence? AID - 10.1136/bmjgh-2021-008386 DP - 2022 Mar 01 TA - BMJ Global Health PG - e008386 VI - 7 IP - 3 4099 - http://gh.bmj.com/content/7/3/e008386.short 4100 - http://gh.bmj.com/content/7/3/e008386.full SO - BMJ Global Health2022 Mar 01; 7 AB - Two years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, key questions about the emergence of its aetiological agent (SARS-CoV-2) remain a matter of considerable debate. Identifying when SARS-CoV-2 began spreading among people is one of those questions. Although the current canonically accepted timeline hypothesises viral emergence in Wuhan, China, in November or December 2019, a growing body of diverse studies provides evidence that the virus may have been spreading worldwide weeks, or even months, prior to that time. However, the hypothesis of earlier SARS-CoV-2 circulation is often dismissed with prejudicial scepticism and experimental studies pointing to early origins are frequently and speculatively attributed to false-positive tests. In this paper, we critically review current evidence that SARS-CoV-2 had been circulating prior to December of 2019, and emphasise how, despite some scientific limitations, this hypothesis should no longer be ignored and considered sufficient to warrant further larger-scale studies to determine its veracity.There are no data in this work.