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Podcast: In Focus by The Hindu
Episode: Covid-19 Origins: How plausible really is the ‘lab leak’ hypothesis?
Description: 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 o...