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This is on point. I'm Magnghachra Bardi. Four years ago this week

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer made news with its announcement that the company would

expand its phase three clinical trials of a COVID vaccine to more than 44,000 people.

Hope was rising that an effective vaccine would soon be available.

By this month, four years ago one million people

worldwide had already died in the pandemic and many many more deaths were to come.

There was still so much unknown about SARS Kove 2, the virus that causes

COVID. Finding answers was made vastly more difficult because by this time in 2020 almost every aspect

of the pandemic had already been politicized.

But perhaps none had been more politicized than this.

Where did the virus that causes COVID come from?

Did it jump from animals to humans?

Or did SARS Kovey 2 escape from a lab leak?

Four years later, that we still haven't definitively answered that question,

says a lot about how hard it is to do good science in the middle of a global

pandemic and in the middle of a global political firestorm.

And I emphasize the word definitively when it comes to finding answers.

...