Gripping and admirable: BBC Radio 4’s Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origins reviewed

It’s the whodunnit – or whatdunnit – that has kept scientists, politicians, journalists and armchair sleuths speculating ever since the first stories of a ‘mysterious viral pneumonia’ began leaking out of Wuhan: where did Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, come from? Was it an unlucky natural occurrence, a bat virus which made the opportunistic leap from animals to humans somewhere in the pulsing zoonotic stew of a Wuhan wet market? Or did it stem from the accidental infection of a laboratory worker, most likely in the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which by 2019 had collected nearly 20,000 bat samples, and more than 1,500 individual coronavirus sequences?

Both theories – and variations thereof – have their passionate backers. The truth of what happened sits in history, a stubborn little sequence of hard facts. But the difficulty lies in reaching those facts, buried as they may now be beneath hardened layers of undisclosed data, Chinese government obfuscation, opaque scientific methods and US political manoeuvrings.