Hi, this is David Kwaman. I'm an author and journalist and I've been writing articles

and books about emerging diseases and novel viruses for the past two decades.

This week's Sunday Read is a story of mine about the origins of the COVID virus.

We still don't know, with total certainty, how the coronavirus pandemic started. Where

did that virus come from? Earlier this year, I saw that the idea of a lab leak origin

was becoming more popular, even though there was no increase in evidence to support that

hypothesis. And that imbalance concerned me had puzzled me. So, in this piece I wrote

for the New York Times magazine, I explored two questions that are still controversial

more than three and a half years into this pandemic.

First, what is the origin of the virus known as SARS-CoV-2? Where did it come from?

And second, why is the preponderance of evidence on one side of the debate and the preponderance

of public opinion on another? So, the origins debate centers on three main hypotheses.

The first is the natural origin hypothesis, the idea that the virus spilled over from

a wild animal, probably an animal that had been brought to the infamous wet market, the

one on market, in Wuhan, China, and was being sold for food.

The second hypothesis argues that the COVID virus is a bio-weapon that was intentionally engineered

and released to infect people. And then there is a third theory, the lab leak hypothesis.

It suggests that a lab worker in Wuhan was doing research on coronaviruses, possibly altering

a virus's genome to see if certain alterations would make it more dangerous to humans. And

then this lab worker, so the theory goes, got infected with the virus and carried it out

into the world. And that became the pandemic.

Now, I want to emphasize that we still don't know for sure which of these hypotheses

...