Origins: Birth of a Pandemic Podcast

There is hardly a human alive who wasn't affected in some way by the COVID-19 pandemic. But almost two years after the SARS-CoV-2 virus began infecting people in the city of Wuhan in China, the world still has no clear answer on exactly where the virus came from.

In Origins: Birth of a Pandemic, journalist John Duffy explores the strong possibility that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Built from interviews with scientists from around the world who have been working to get to the bottom of how the pandemic began, Origins critiques the media and academic institutions that tried to denigrate the lab leak hypothesis.

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Listen to Origins

Part 1

In part one of Origins: Birth of a Pandemic, we meet Dr. Jonathan Latham of the Bioscience Resource Project and Independentsciencenews.org.

Part 2

In Part Two of Origins: Birth of a Pandemic, we explore the concept of gain of function research by hearing scientists like Ralph Baric and Marc Lipsitch discuss its promise as well as its pitfalls.

Part 3

In part three of Origins: Birth of a Pandemic, we learn about Peter Daszak, the head of the Eco Health Alliance, a conservation group that has funneled NIH and other government funding to Dr. Shi Zhengli and her team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Part 4

In Part Four of Origins: Birth of a Pandemic, we meet Paul Thacker, an independent journalist who has written for the British Medical Journal, and discuss just how various scientific publications were used to steer public opinion away from the lab leak hypothesis.

Part 5

In Part 5 of Origins, we hear from Dr. Filippa Lentzos and Dr. Alina Chan who both spoke at an online conference about the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus about pandemic investigations and the likelihood of a spillover in Wuhan, respectively.

Part 6

In Part 6 of Origins, Paul Thacker joins us again to talk about the revelations contained within the NIH grant award documents to the Eco Health Alliance, as well as what was contained in the Eco Health Alliance's DEFUSE grant application to DARPA.