Free Republic

First lady Jill Biden tested positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday in a "rebound" case, her office said. Jill Biden, who is double vaccinated and twice boosted, was prescribed the antiviral treatment Paxlovid, which President Biden also took after testing positive last month. Like his wife, the president also suffered a rebound COVID-19 case.

LONDON — Omicron is “the most significant threat” to public health in the U.K., authorities warned Wednesday, as the World Health Organization cautioned that the highly contagious Covid-19 variant was spreading at an unprecedented rate. Britain reported 59,610 new Covid infections on Tuesday, the highest figure since early January and the fifth highest recorded since the outbreak of the pandemic in March last year. More than 5,300 cases of omicron have been recorded in the U.K., with 10 people hospitalized. One person died after contracting the variant. New regulations intended to help slow the spread of omicron, including masks in...

Nearly two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the origin of the virus tormenting the world remains shrouded in mystery. Most scientists believe it emerged in the wild and jumped from bats to humans, either directly or through another animal. Others theorize it escaped from a Chinese lab. Now, with the global COVID-19 death toll surpassing 5.2 million on the second anniversary of the earliest human cases, a growing chorus of scientists is trying to keep the focus on what they regard as the more plausible “zoonotic,” or animal-to-human, theory, in the hope that what’s learned will help humankind fend off...