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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots and Spectator's Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by James O'Sife and Isabel Hardman.

Now there's been much debate and speculation about where exactly COVID

originated from, but we're going to at least see how we might learn more. James, can you give

us the latest update? So there's a fascinating story on CNN today about how US intelligence

have managed to get a whole bunch of genetic blueprints

from the virus samples studied at the lab in Wuhan and China, which is the center of the whole

lab leak hypothesis. It is very unlikely that there is going to be a firm answer to the lab leak

question one way or the other. It is always going to be,

I mean, I think it seems highly unlikely there's going to be a kind of smoking gun piece of

evidence found. It's much more likely, but it's about the where the balance of probabilities

between this, be coming from a lab and being naturally occurring are.

Isabel, when it comes to the lab league, we know how this has been politicised.

So if it becomes increasingly compelling evidence that this is, for example,

origin of China, we've had the lab leak theories. How does that play out politically? And I think

it's an example of the folly of being too confident about something, which I think we've all

learned a lot about during this pandemic, which is when the lab leak hypothesis was first mooted,

initially it was, it was considered, it was taken seriously. And then it

suddenly became something that, as we've covered in the magazine, became associated for some reason

with, with racism. And people were dismissing it very quickly, saying, oh, it's a conspiracy theory,

it's racist. And they were doing so with a great deal of confidence but not very much evidence and

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