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. It requires an intrepid character to attempt excavations. Step forward John Sudworth, a former BBC China correspondent, and his podcast Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origin, also being broadcast on Radio 4.

Sudworth has form in irritating the Chinese authorities. In 2021 he had to leave for Taiwan after his reporting triggered a government backlash. Episode one of Fever recalls his investigative foray to the bat-caves of China’s southwestern Yunnan province, where researchers garnered material to tell them more about Sars-type coronaviruses. While in the region, Sudworth and his team were harried by every possible variety of state personnel, including the fire brigade (‘I’m not on fire!’ you hear him protesting). But as he probed the ‘lab leak’ hypothesis, noises from the West weren’t much more encouraging: western scientists said this was ‘chasing a conspiracy theory’.