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Steve Chapple's avatar

Really excellent article by Quammen in today’s NY Times Magazine on the origins of Covid. Take a read. It’s the best sum-up yet, and also revisit HOT GLOBE’s April column with Dave and a fascinating Audio a week later. DQ’s literary touches come through nicely:

We still don’t know how the pandemic started. Here's what we do know — and why it matters.

By David Quammen

David Quammen is the author of “Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus,” about Covid-19, and “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic,” among other books.

July 25, 2023Updated 10:28 a.m. ET

Where did it come from? More than three years into the pandemic and untold millions of people dead, that question about the Covid-19 coronavirus remains controversial and fraught, with facts sparkling amid a tangle of analyses and hypotheticals like Christmas lights strung on a dark, thorny tree. One school of thought holds that the virus, known to science as SARS-CoV-2, spilled into humans from a nonhuman animal, probably in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a messy emporium in Wuhan, China, brimming with fish, meats and wildlife on sale as food. Another school argues that the virus was laboratory-engineered to infect humans and cause them harm — a bioweapon — and was possibly devised in a “shadow project” sponsored by the People’s Liberation Army of China. A third school, more moderate than the second but also implicating laboratory work, suggests that the virus got into its first human victim by way of an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (W.I.V.), a research complex on the eastern side of the city, maybe after well-meaning but reckless genetic manipulation that made it more dangerous to people.

Listen 58:14

apps.apple.com/us/app/nyt-audio/id15492…

If you feel confused by these possibilities, undecided, suspicious of overconfident assertions — or just tired of the whole subject of the pandemic and whatever little bug has caused it — be assured that you aren’t the only one.

Some contrarians say that it doesn’t matter, the source of the virus. What matters, they say, is how we cope with the catastrophe it has brought, the illness and death it continues to cause. Those contrarians are wrong. It does matter. Research priorities, pandemic preparedness around the world, health policies and public opinion toward science itself will be lastingly affected by the answer to the origin question — if we ever get a definitive answer. MORE —-

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Steve Chapple's avatar

And see Dave Quammen's recent Op-Ed in the NY Times: "WHY ARE BIRDS FALLING FROM THE SKY?"--https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/23/opinion/bird-flu.html

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