Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Long before he waded into politics, Britain's Prime Minister drove fast cars for GQ magazine.

Now there's an environmental imperative to clamp down on non-electric vehicles,

and he faces a reckoning with the petrol heads aligned with his party.

And the history of food is filled with both evolution and appropriation.

Few foods, though, have conquered the globe as completely as fried chicken has.

We look into how it got its start in America and how its first cooks have disappeared from the story.

But first... The delta strain of the coronavirus is completing its journey around the world.

Today, cases in New Zealand spiked after it hitched a ride from Australia.

But what about the original variant, the patient

zero, what geneticists call the wild type, before mutations made it more infectious? Its origins

are still a mystery. Probably it jumped from an animal to a human, but the alternatives simply

haven't been ruled out. This week, the leader of the World Health Organization's mission to China

said the answer could be research work gone wrong.

The WHO has asked China for permission to examine two coronavirus labs in the city of Wuhan.

China refused.

It's a question that won't go away, and the answer isn't just

about this pandemic. It's crucial for navigating or even avoiding the next one.

From our estimates, about 15 million people so far have died of COVID-19 around the world. And despite this, there has

been no thorough international investigation of how this virus originated in China at the end of

2019. Natasha Loder is the economist's health policy editor.

A WHO convened study that issued a report in March this year is really widely seen as being fatally flawed.

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