The Sunday Read: ‘The Ongoing Mystery of Covid’s Origin’

By David Quammen Produced by Adrienne Hurst and Aaron Esposito Edited by John Woo Original music by Aaron Esposito Engineered by Corey Schreppel and Brian St. Pierre Listen to and follow “The Daily”Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher Where did it come from? More than three years into the pandemic with untold millions of people dead, that question about the origin of Covid-19 remains widely disputed and fraught, with facts sparkling amid a tangle of analyses and hypotheticals like Christmas lights strung on a dark, thorny tree. One school of…

U.S. Intelligence Agencies May Never Find Covid’s Origins, Officials Say

For three years, the U.S. government has been tied in knots over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, frustrated that China’s hindrance of investigations and unwillingness to look critically at its own research have obscured what intelligence agencies can learn about whether the virus escaped from a lab. Inquiries during the Trump and Biden administrations have yielded no definitive answers. The Energy Department and the F.B.I. favored the theory that a laboratory leak may have caused the pandemic. Five intelligence bodies considered theories of natural transmission — that the coronavirus…