Why Finding the Origins of Covid-19 Matters for the Next Pandemic

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The Wall Street Journal

Technology

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 31 December 2021

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's been more than two years since the global pandemic started, and the search for the origin of the virus continues. Scientists, government agencies and the World Health Organization-as well as our own Wall Street Journal reporters-have tried to nail down whether the pandemic began when an animal transferred the virus to humans, or if it came out of a laboratory accident. But the hunt has been marred by secrecy and confusion. In this episode: why it's so important to find answers, and what new monitoring systems are being developed to ease identification of future viral outbreaks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This episode is brought to you by Twilio,
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0:06.1	Visit Twilio.com slash Gartner to learn why Twilio was named a leader
0:10.6	in Gartner's first-ever 2023 Magic Quadrant for communications platform as a service.
0:30.0	Back in 2012, in the mountains of rural southwest China,
0:34.4	six men went into a small abandoned copper mine to clean a backwater, or a bat poop.
0:43.9	Then they got sick. Three of them died.
0:47.8	Doctors couldn't figure out what they had.
0:50.5	So they called in a world-renowned Chinese research center to figure out what they died of.
0:56.8	This is my colleague, Wall Street Journal senior writer Betsy McKay.
1:01.0	The Wuhan Institute of Erology has China's most advanced labs.
1:06.4	It's renowned for studying coronaviruses.
1:10.5	Many of those coronaviruses come from southwest China where the mine was located.
1:16.4	That region is a hotspot for coronaviruses and bats.
1:21.4	Several years after the mine workers died, some scientists from the institute wrote up a report on what they found.
1:29.4	Turns out they identified several coronaviruses in the mine,
1:33.4	including one from the same family as the one that caused the first SARS epidemic in the early 2000s.
1:41.4	It didn't gain a whole lot of attention at the time.
1:45.4	Then in late 2019, people started getting infected with COVID-19 caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
1:55.4	The first known cases broke out in Wuhan, China,
1:58.4	and that sparked increased global interest in the city and in the Wuhan Institute of Erology.
2:05.4	Then the Wuhan Institute of Erology researchers wrote another paper saying they'd found a virus
	...

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