Did Covid-19 leak from a lab?
The News Agents
Global
4.1 • 5.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2023
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Covid is back in the news - there is a new mutation of Omicron which is potentially more infectious than the last.
Some are sounding the alarm. We talk about whether you should be worried (spoiler -probably not). But while it's in the news we thought we'd examine a question long lurking at the sidelines of the Covid news story - where did it come from?
Is the lab leak theory increasingly credible? Plenty in Washington, including big elements of the Biden administration think so. And if it is - why are we not talking about it? What might be the biggest story of our time?
Lewis talks to a leading expert who sits on SAGE and a journalist who has done the running on the story from the very beginning.
Editor: Tom Hughes
Producers: Rory Symon and Alex Barnett
Social Media Editor: Georgia Foxwell
Video Producer: Will Gibson-Smith
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Newsagents podcast is brought to you by HSBC UK, opening up a world of opportunity. |
| 0:09.1 | This is a global player original podcast. |
| 0:13.1 | The Energy Department says it now believes a lab leak in China is most likely the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. |
| 0:20.1 | The lab leak theory is also an accidental theory. It's most likely the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic. The lab leak theory is also an accidental |
| 0:22.9 | theory. It is that someone got infected in the lab and then it starts to spread. Either they made a |
| 0:29.5 | terrible mistake. Probably it was incompetent. Somebody was stupid. They didn't do the job that they should |
| 0:36.1 | have done. Tip yourself, open-minded means everything is possible. |
| 0:40.3 | When you look at the labs, I think this is really important. |
| 0:42.3 | You have to look at the circumstantial evidence of where they're located. |
| 0:45.3 | One of them is just two blocks away from that first amplification point, the market. |
| 0:49.3 | And that is an awfully large coincidence. |
| 0:52.3 | In fact, the WHO has said the lab leak is a credible theory and has asked China for its help. |
| 0:58.0 | That help has not been forthcoming. |
| 1:00.0 | They launched this relentless propaganda campaign to try to counter the narrative, to try to sow doubt and deflect blame. |
| 1:07.0 | There was even some misinformation that the 5G network was spreading the Wuhan virus. |
| 1:11.6 | Reporters treated this initially as if it was nothing more than a crazy unhinged conspiracy theory. |
| 1:17.6 | Last month, President Biden asked the US intelligence community to double down in answering this one question, where did COVID come from? |
| 1:25.6 | It's important to know the answer to that. |
| 1:29.2 | COVID is back in the news. |
| 1:31.6 | There's a new mutation of the Omicron variant. |
| 1:34.6 | Even talking about these things feels slightly peculiar, slightly out of time, though the virus has never left us. |
| 1:41.6 | Our collective gaze has seen permanently askance, pretty much for the last year or so. |
... |
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