this. is nightline tonight covid origins debate inside their urgent race to find the truth. it's overwhelmingly likely that this started at the qanon seafood market. you think it was a laughably? absolutely we return to ground zero in wuhan. how solving the mystery of what happened here could help stop the next global pandemic. if we want to prevent this type of catastrophic event from happening again. we need to understand the root causes of this emergence. plus zach brad from this doctor's scrubs, ted, i'm a little busy, okay. toodles to the director's chair. man of

many talents, joins me to talk about his new film. a good person. how he channeled a series of personal tragedies. i wanted to write about grief and standing back up from grief and what he revealed about the film's lead. actress florence pugh, who's also his ex. we break news here on nightline. nightline will be right back. what's the number one retinol brnd used most by dermatologists. it's neutrogena rapid wrinkle repair smooths the look of fine lines in one week, deep wrinkles and four so you can kiss wrinkles. goodbye, neutrogena. one prilosec otc each morning blacks heartburn all day and all night. prilosec otc reduces excess asset for 24 hours blocking heartburn before

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good evening. thank you for joining us. the world came to a screeching halt three years ago this month. and seven million lives have since been lost to covid 19. but we're exactly the virus came from remains an open question. abc senior national correspondent terry moran talked to the experts on both sides of this heated debate. wuhan china ground zero of a worldwide pandemic and the epicenter of a debate that continues to gather steam. a new report on the possible origins of covid 19 argument that it started with an accidental lab leak in wuhan. china suggests a link from the virus to raccoon dogs. here in this city of 11 million are shuttered, wet market, which once sold illegal wildlife. many scientists believe this is where the covid pandemic that killed nearly seven million people

began. why would this start? at a place that has all of these ingredients that we know start pandemics. why the place that sells the raccoon dogs? still others, like former world health organization advisor jamie metzl point elsewhere, preponderance of circumstantial evidence weighs in favor of an accidental research related incident. you think it was a lab? lee absolutely. everyone has an opinion. even comedian jon stewart. there's anovel respiratory coronavirus, overtaking wuhan, china. what do we do? you know who we could ask the wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. three years after the first lockdowns. wuhan has sprung back to life. tourist sites once ordered shut, are now filled with sightseers again, and train stations now buzzing

with activity again. but what do we know about where covid 19 came from? and why does identifying its origin still matter if we want to prevent this type of catastrophic event from happening again? we need to understand the root causes of this emergence and what can we do to mitigate? those conditions from happening again. scientific community has published multiple peer reviewed papers supporting a natural origin of the pandemic . that's when a human is exposed to an infected animal outside the lab. this has been the case for many other viruses like swine flu and sars jumping species naturally. experts say it can often take years to find that linking animal for some viruses like ebola scientists are still searching. i don't think that answer is going to come from the scientific community. i think that answer is going to come from the intelligence community, but the u. s intelligence community remains split with four agencies

in the national intelligence council, believing that the most likely origin of covid was natural, while the fbi and the u. s department of energy believe, with varying degrees of confidence that covid 19 most likely first emerged through an accidental lab leak, the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in wuhan. although all agree on one point, there's a broad consensus in the intelligence community that the outbreak is not the result of a bioweapon or genetic engineering. president biden just this week signed a bill that will declassify intelligence gathered on covid origins in the coming months after both houses of congress voted for the bill unanimously. it is my great honor to join you today. jamie metal was one of the first witnesses called to testify before congressional committee this month investigating covid's origins. where else would investigators look in in war? there's two labs

of interest. one is the wuhan institute of virology, and the other is the wuhan. cdc centers for disease control of all the places where you could have an outbreak. it's not in southern china, where they have these kinds of horseshoe bats. it's in wuhan, where they have the world's largest collection of coronavirus is the wuhan institute of virology, has long been known for its work on corona viruses in bats. it's where virologists zhongli, dubbed the batwoman runs. a lab research is still very active, spoke with shoes colleague lin fa wang, who has collaborated with her for years as soon as they heard. it's a coronavirus. of course, you know, she says she was concerned, so they had to go through all the samples in their freezer. to make sure that the new virus is not the same as they have. you should only has said it didn't come from my lab . but we have no way of knowing whether that's the case or not, because there has been zero transparency. abc news reached out to professor xu about her

previous and current work, but she did not respond, says the idea of a lab leak was largely dismissed as unlikely and slammed as a conspiracy theory when he first brought it up back in 2020. but he says there's now been a shift on his podcast this month, jon stewart reflected on being criticized for giving oxygen to the lab leak theory in 2021 backlash was swift. uh immediate and was quite loud, larger problem with all of this is the inability to discuss things that are within the realm of possibility without falling into absolute and litmus testing each other for our political allegiances as it arose from that. do you think that the atmosphere around this question is changed. absolutely in february of 2020. there was a letter signed by 27 very senior scientists in the lancet that

the british medical journal calling people like me raising just common sense questions about pandemic origins, including the possibility of a research related origin conspiracy theorists. so for the first year, it was kind of a brutal process. i really felt lonely. metal says that lancet letter essentially chilled the public discourse, it said. we strongly condemned conspiracy theories suggesting that covid 19 does not have a natural origin, adding that multiple scientists overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife virologist michael warby studies the origins of pandemics. there is enough evidence to say that it's overwhelmingly likely that this started at the juan in seafood market. just this week, warby and a team of researchers issued a new report based on partial data initially shared on a database by scientists at china's cdc. the group's report

. not yet peer reviewed showed genetic material from the virus intermingled with raccoon dog dna found at the wuhan wet market in the early days of the pandemic, zeroing in on a potential intermediary animal host for the virus. raccoon dog, which is a close relative to the fox. here in these images taken in 2014 shared exclusively with abc news, a visiting scientist captured photos of raccoon dogs in cages being sold at that wet market alongside poultry, rodents and snakes is wildlife found in the exact same area of the market were positive samples of covid would be found in 2020. is there any way that the virus could have come to the market from somewhere else before that, and the market acted as a super spreader. yeah so we've actually looked at that, and there's one really clear line of evidence

that it wasn't just a super spreader event where you would have one lineage of the virus amplified. it turns out that there were two lineages of this virus. earlier. worby says this is significant. if the virus had leaked from a lab, you would only expect one strain. but if it jumped from animals, this could have happened multiple times. explaining the two lineages, he says. in the early months of the pandemic, he was open to all theories of origin, including an accidental lab leak. if it had come out of the lab accidentally. it could have been a super spreader in the subway, the supermarket movie theater, but it seems the early clusters are around that wet market or it could have been spreadingat the lab itself, which there's no evidence of it would be great if we could fully discern the origin and the chain of events that led to the pandemic that will help us put in place. preventive measures.

the sooner we start to address some of the potential vulnerabilities, the safer we will all be globally. that concerns certainly weighs on the mind of maria van kirk off head of the w. h o s response to covid 19, including the hunt for its origin. we will not stop the pursuit of understanding how this pandemic began. and we will exhaust every avenue until we can rule certain hypotheses out, but she admits they've hit roadblocks. wh oh, don't currently have all that evidence because some of the studies and investigations that have been requested by w. h o have not been carried out in china as the world health organization. we are not able to force a country to do anything. united states intelligence community went even further in a recent report. writing that when it comes to covid origins, beijing continues to hinder the global investigation, resist sharing information and blame other countries, including the united

states, in response to questions from abc news, the chinese foreign ministry said. china has shared the most data and research results and made the greatest contribution to global origin tracing research. it is the common responsibility of all countries in the world to find the source of the novel coronavirus. at present, the main reason why the origin tracing research is hindered is the political manipulation of the united states. we have a global system in place that are looking at alerts around the world, and some experts say they're concerned about america's ability to respond to the next threat. i think we can expect our performance next time to be no better than what we did this time, potentially actually, even worse, because i think we've eroded much of the public confidence in our public health and health systems. now the race to find covid origin, some argue , is a race to stop the next pandemic, although we have to

take lab safety and security extremely seriously, it's the rest of the world that operates at biosafety level zero and brings in animals too. these sorts of marketplaces that is the huge threat that we shouldn't take our eyes off of. thanks to terry up next my interview with actor director zach braff about grief hope and this powerful new film. moderate to severe ulcerative colitis keeps flaring in check with invoke a once daily pill when you see god unpredictable, i got rapid symptom relief with one vote and left bathroom. urgency behind check when you see god in my way, i got lasting steroid free remission with invoke check. my gastro saw damaged, invoke, helped visibly repair the colon lining check.

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he is an actor well known for his comic charm, but he's also a writer and director in his new film, explores grief and hope to topics he has grappled with in his own life. i sat down with zach braff. zach braff. welcome to nightline. thank you to have you. congratulations on your fourth film. you're directing a good person. what's it about? and what were you hoping to achieve with it? well it's about initially a car accident. that happens where there's fatalities and how that affects the lives of these two intermingled families. it ends up becoming about addiction. how we deal with grief standing up from trauma and tragedy, hope, love. and even though these are heavy subject matter matters, there's also a lot of humor folded in because in my own experience with trauma and grief, i was so grateful when someone would say something, and there'd be a

release and then be laughter because your your body and your mind you're just craving. letting some steam out of the steam engine. part of your gifting as an artist is humor it so well, what if i may ask in your own journey? let you to tell this particular story? well in 2016. my sister had an aneurysm, and they kept her alive as a fraction of herself for about two years. then she finally passed. my father then didn't last much longer. and then we went into covid and lockdown and one of my best friends who was living with me at 41 years old, got covid and died. i sat down to write something i was staring at the lincoln cursor. and this is what came out of me. i wanted to write about grief and standing back up from grief. how our lives changed in a split second , sometimes about hope you have an all star cast. yes starts. morgan freeman, florence pugh and molly shannon. that's my pretty epic dream guest. i wrote

it for florence. we were partners at the time and we were in lockdown together, and i'm just incredibly in awe of her talent. and i never imagined i'd get morgan freeman, but that was sort of a daydream the clip from the film and take a look at that now i'm talking the other side of allison. don't go. this was a mistake. no, no, it isn't. trust me. i know how hard it is to get here. it's near impossible, and you did it. don't run away now because of me. there are thousands of meetings. i'll find another one. wow yeah, but this one has the best snacks, humor their love. that scene is where she was beginning the path of going to a morgue in freeman, uh , is someone that she knew already was going to be her father in law. she reaches a nadir with her addiction and decides to finally have the courage to shop to meeting becomes about this friendship, this very unlikely friendship that begins when these two people who are grieving about

the same event, but separately and so need each other. what do you want to take away to be for the audience? i want to take away to be that there is always hope but often sometimes in my life, it's been someone who you never would have fathomed would be the person to help you and especially in the recovery if you're often being rescued by by strangers, the movie takes place in new jersey a state near and dear to your heart near your hometown. why putit there? i think i was really trying to write something very authentic and very vulnerable for myself and be as honest as i could about my own emotions, and i almost felt like there was this safety net if i if i put it in a place that i knew very, very well, i am not going to mess up. what south orange, new jersey looks like. so i found comfort in that because of the grief that you've experienced where you are now in your life is are you in the midst of your hopeful , happy ending? i must say that i wrote this in a bubble during

the pandemic. we shot it during covid in 26 days, which was very tough, so it's now that i go to the theaters and i screened the movie with people. there. i feel such community and love. you know you some of these feelings that i've felt you can feel so lonely and no matter how many people are around, you can feel incredibly lonesome. and when you see the response you feel seen you feel community. you feel that other people feel these emotions and that's very, very healing. i think you are. director producer writer, gifted actor. what's next for you been directing this new show shrinking with harrison ford, jason segal on on apple, plus which i'm very proud. how to be a part of so i'll be directing a bunch more of those next season. then i'm writing something new already for myself to direct and right.can we break news here on nightline? the only news i'll break is that i'm writing it for florence pugh because i she's my favorite actress, so i hope that she agrees to work with me again because she's an inspiration and amused for me is outstanding.

outstanding i appreciate that. the movie it it spoke to my spirit. it lifted me. i think all of us could use stories of the deal with difficult matters that are hopeful. in your film leaves us all hopeful. thank you so much. i'm just so honored to be here. i really am. thank you. a good person premieres in theaters this friday, march 24th. up next the special delivery at the houston zoo. proof that slow and steady sometimes does win the race. we love our new home. there's so much space. we have a guest room now, but we have ants. you're slouching again, ted. expired expired. expired thanks, aunt bonnie of house. hope you can keep it clean. at least geico makes bundling our home and car insurance easy, which helps us save a lot of money. oh, teddy, did you get my friend request? i'll have to check. joni's here made easy. go to geico .com.

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i'm going to mandalore. dublin. wakanda. ♪ ♪give me the greenlight♪ now is our time. may the force be with you! ♪ ♪greenlight♪ and finally tonight, some baby news. conservationists are celebrating their rival of three

endangered turtles at the houston zoo. remarkably the first time father is the oldest animal there a 90 year old radiated tortoise. they call mr pickles and at 53, mrs pickles is no spring chicken. all kidding aside, officials hope those hatchlings will help the species in the long run. and that's nightline for this evening. catch a full episodes on julia, we'll see you right back here. same time tomorrow. thanks for the company america goodnight. from america's number one news comes the all new abc news app. if you love