There is growing public support among the world’s scientific community for fully exploring the possibility the coronavirus may have emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.Observers say the hypothesis became perniciously intertwined with the administration of former US President Donald Trump’s inflammatory anti-China rhetoric and xenophobic framing of the pandemic, causing an apparent chilling effect among the scientific community.J Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Al Jazeera that the question of whether a lab accident was the origin got stuck in this hyper-politicised context.He says when Trump was instrumentalising the issue as part of an anti-China and anti-Asia campaign, people didn’t want to associate with that so they kept their distance.