Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio.

I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Latin America and the Caribbean suffered under some of the world's tightest lockdowns

and, as elsewhere, that has had calamitous effects on the region's economies.

We take a look at the prospects for long-term recovery.

And artificial insemination is a tried and true method in the animal world just as it is

for humans.

But things are a bit more complicated when the animal is a shark.

We examine a pioneering effort to keep shark populations stable and healthy.

We start up though.

There are two main theories about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The first and the one most widely held by scientists is that a virus jumped unated from animals

to humans.

The other is that it first emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic started.

Conspiracies have swirled around the Chinese state-backed lab.

It's thought to have conducted research into diseases in bats.

Multiple sources say this may be the costliest government cover-up of all time by China.

The lab leak theory has long been viewed as lacking credibility, one for the conspiracists

or the cranks.

But with some crucial questions still unanswered, the idea has been gaining traction.

Yesterday, President Joe Biden asked his intelligence teams to look deeper into the pandemic's

...