Hello and welcome to the political orphanage a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host Andrew Heaton, and today we're going to talk about the origin of COVID,

where it came from, why it's so difficult to determine that.

Because it turns out there's two problems

with tracking down the genesis of the pandemic.

One is the forensic whodunit,

and the other is politics,

the geopolitical posturing between China, the World Health Organization

and the United States, and here domestically, how it all gets sucked into the culture war.

We're going to speak to my favorite science writer and member of the

House of Lords, Matt Ridley, plus my new favorite Canadian molecular biologist Elena Chan,

but before I do that I want to do a quick chat with my frequent accomplice Justin Robert Young hello Justin well hello mr

Heaton the thing that I'm interested in that I kind of want to talk to you about before we get into it is

is why this is as much of a hot button issue as it is. So I've already

spoken to them. We're going to have them on momentarily but just Google searching them

earlier today to make sure their names right for the episode description.

There's all these headlines about how this is conspiracy mongering.

Alina Chan, I don't know if this was aside from when I talked to her or whether it's later development

seems to be flirting with changing her name because the really blowback from

what we're about to talk about today that I have to say struck me as a fairly

methodical scientific just discussion of origins is apparently

kind of a big deal making lots of waves.

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