More than a year after COVID-19 first made the headlines, the most basic questions about the origins of SARS-COV-2 remain unanswered. We still don’t know how the first human being got infected. We don’t know if this virus naturally evolved the proteins needed to infect humans, or if those mutations were engineered in a lab.

At the same time, these questions – which need scientific answers – have become heavily politicised. Until early 2021, the hypothesis that the pandemic originated in a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was dismissed as a crackpot theory. But now a series of in-depth media reports have given the lab leak hypothesis new respectability. How do we understand this sudden shift? What are the various interests and agendas trying to influence the origins narrative? And will we ever know for sure what exactly caused a pandemic that has dislocated modern life in so many profound ways?

To better understand these fascinating questions, we speak to Thomas Abraham, adjunct associate professor at the University of Hong Kong and author of Twenty-First Century Plague: The Story of SARS.

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