4.4 • 645 Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2022
⏱️ 51 minutes
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0:00.0 | Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine. My guest today is Dr. Alina Chan. She is a molecular biologist and a post-doctoral |
0:24.9 | fellow at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and she is the co-author of the new book, |
0:31.1 | Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19. Dr. Chan has developed a reputation as one of the foremost commentators |
0:41.1 | on the debate over the origins of the COVID pandemic and was one of the people most instrumental |
0:49.8 | in forcing a greater discussion of the possibility that the virus may have emerged from a lab in China rather than from... |
1:04.0 | Well, actually, we're going to discuss this because I think... |
1:06.6 | Actually, the place I want to start, okay, is that I think that I nearly slipped into it myself |
1:14.2 | just then, right? Which I said, you know, from a lab rather than from, and I was going to say, |
1:21.2 | you know, there's a lot of, if you read articles about this, they say, you know, there's a |
1:25.8 | hypothesis of a zoonotic spillover |
1:29.6 | versus the virus coming from a lab. And I feel like one of the values of your work has been |
1:38.2 | to try and make a little more clear the different possibilities that we're actually talking about and what |
1:47.7 | they really mean. So perhaps we could start with you clarifying for us what exactly are the |
1:56.9 | alternatives here when we're talking about the possibilities that are being considered |
2:02.3 | for the origins of COVID-19. |
2:06.4 | Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. |
2:08.2 | So this topic is really complicated. |
2:11.3 | And one of the biggest challenges is that because it's so complicated, |
2:15.0 | people like to talk about it in really overly simplified terms. |
2:18.3 | So when we're talking about natural spillover, immediately most people would think about bats or the wildlife trade. |
2:25.3 | So pangolins, civet cats, raccoon dogs being traded and eaten. |
2:30.3 | And this is certainly still a plausible way that COVID-19 could have emerged, is that it was a virus inside a bat or a animal in the wildlife trade. |
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