Dozens of scientists have now signed an open letter to Nature Medicine calling for the paper to be retracted.
One of the signatories, Prof Neil Harrison, professor of anaesthesiology, molecular pharmacology and therapeutics at Columbia University, said: “Virologists and their allies have produced a number of papers that purport to show that the virus was of natural origin and that the pandemic began at the Huanan seafood market.
“In fact there is no evidence for either of these conclusions, and the email and Slack messages among the authors show that they knew at the time that this was the case.