In part one of Origins: Birth of a Pandemic, we meet Dr. Jonathan Latham of the Bioscience Resource Project and Independentsciencenews.org. Dr. Latham talks about how he came to believe that it was likely that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID19, escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). We also hear that a network of independent researchers called D.R.A.S.T.I.C. came together to work towards to discover the true source of the virus, and in doing so, confirmed that the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2 is actually a virus that Dr. Shi Zhengli of the WIV partially sequenced back in 2016, and further, that the virus is connected to a mystery pneumonia suffered by six men from Yunnan, China, back in 2012.