That means there is little cause for complacency. With the virus still circulating widely, the risk of a dangerous new variant remains very real.
Two years on, we’re also still arguing over where and why covid-19 started in the first place, because scientists are still hunting for the definitive clues.
Welcome to Curious Coincidence. A five-part podcast that tells the story of the hunt for those clues. Hosted by our senior editor for biomedicine, Antonio Regalado, it’s a detective story about the genome of the virus, about people in labs doing sensitive research on dangerous germs and the crisis they’re in now.
It’s a story about why people remain silent and why they speak out. It’s about the sheer power of biotechnology, the science that allowed us to develop vaccines quickly—but also might be what got us into trouble in the first place.
Why is it so hard to find out its origin story, and why does the search matter?
As Natasha Loder, health policy editor at the Economist, says in the podcast: “You can’t learn from history if you don’t know what your history is, if your history is buried.”
