Viral The Search For The Origin Of Covid 19

Understanding how Covid-19 started is more important than we know for the future of humankind. Determining whether the virus came from nature or from a lab will help us to safeguard against the next pandemic.

"Chan and Ridley write with an urgency...that inspires gripping depictions of what viruses are, how infectious-disease laboratories work and wonderfully lucid descriptions of bats. . . . They powerfully recount how dangerous pathogens can both leak from a lab and emerge in nature." (New York Times Book Review) Understanding how Covid-19 started is crucial for the future of humankind. Viral is the most incisive and authoritative book about the search for the source of the virus. A new virus descended on the human species in 2019 wreaking unprecedented havoc. Finding out where it came from and how it first jumped into people is an urgent priority, but early expectations that this would prove an easy question to answer have been dashed. Nearly two years into the pandemic, the crucial mystery of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not only unresolved but has deepened. In this uniquely insightful book, a scientist and a writer join forces to try to get to the bottom of how a virus whose closest relations live in bats in subtropical southern China somehow managed to begin spreading among people more than 1,500 kilometres away in the city of Wuhan. They grapple with the baffling fact that the virus left none of the expected traces that such outbreaks usually create: no infected market animals or wildlife, no chains of early cases in travellers to the city, no smouldering epidemic in a rural area, no rapid adaptation of the virus to its new host—human beings. To try to solve this pressing mystery, Viral delves deep into the events of 2019 leading up to 2021, the details of what went on in animal markets and virology laboratories, the records and data hidden from sight within archived Chinese theses and websites, and the clues that can be coaxed from the very text of the virus’s own genetic code. The result is a gripping detective story that takes the reader deeper and deeper into a metaphorical cave of mystery. One by one the authors explore promising tunnels only to show that they are blind alleys, until, miles beneath the surface, they find themselves tantalisingly close to a shaft that leads to the light.

What might COVID-19 mean for, and reveal about, China's place in the world? The coronavirus pandemic started in Wuhan, home to the leading lab studying the SARS virus and bats. Was that pure coincidence? This book explores what we know, and still don't know, about the origins of COVID-19, and how it was handled in China. We may never get all the answers, but much is already clear: China's record as the origin of earlier pandemics, and its struggle to bring contagious diseases under control; its history as both a victim of biological warfare and a developer of deadly bioweapons. When Covid broke out, Wuhan was building science parks to realise Beijing's ambitions in biotech research. Whoever achieves global leadership of the gene-editing industry stands to harvest great power and wealth. China has already challenged Western technological supremacy with 5G and in other industries. Yet this tiny, invisible virus has cruelly exposed a critical flaw in the Chinese political system: obsessive secrecy. The West wanted to trust the PRC, hoping that, as it prospered, it would become an open society. Made in China reveals how Beijing's leaders have betrayed that trust.

Chosen as a Book of the Year 2021 by the Financial Times, Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Prospect, Guardian and The Times. 'Vaxxers is so good that the book will be read for long after the pandemic is over' Financial Times 'One of the most epic and pioneering moments in human history' Sir Jeremy Farrar __________ The bestselling inside story of a historic moment for science and for humanity. On 1 January 2020, Professor Sarah Gilbert read an article about four people in China with an illness of unknown cause. Within two weeks, she and her team had designed a new vaccine that would go on to save millions of lives from Covid-19. Capturing a landmark moment, Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green reveal their story of making the pioneering Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine and fighting a pandemic as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. They separate fact from fiction, they explain how they made their highly effective vaccine in record time with the eyes of the world watching, and they give us hope for the future.

Walkley Award-winning journalist, Sharri Markson is the Investigations Editor at The Australian and host of prime-time show Sharri on Sky News Australia. The origins of Covid-19 are shrouded in mystery. Scientists and government officials insisted, for a year and a half, that the virus had a natural origin, ridiculing anyone who dared contradict this view. Tech giants swept the internet, censoring and silencing debate in the most extreme fashion. Yet it is undeniable that a secretive facility in Wuhan was immersed in genetically manipulating bat-coronaviruses in perilous experiments. And as soon as the news of an outbreak in Wuhan leaked, the Chinese military took control and gagged all laboratory insiders. Part-thriller, part-expose, What Really Happened in Wuhan is a ground-breaking investigation from leading journalist Sharri Markson into the origins of Covid-19, the cover-ups, the conspiracies and the classified research. It features never-before-seen primary documents exposing China's concealment of the virus, fresh interviews with whistleblower doctors in Wuhan and crucial eyewitness accounts that dismantle what we thought we knew about when the outbreak hit. With unprecedented access to Washington insiders, Markson takes you inside the White House, with senior Trump lieutenants revealing first-hand accounts of fiery Oval Office clashes and new stories of compromised government advisors and censored scientists. Bravely reported and chillingly laid out, Markson brings to light the stories of the pandemic from the people on the ground: the scientists and national security officials who raised uncomfortable truths and were labelled conspiracy theorists, until government agencies began to suspect they might have been right all along. These brave individuals persisted through bruising battles and played a crucial role in investigating the origins of Covid-19 to finally, in this book, bring us closer to the truth of what really happened in Wuhan.

“A journey into the origins of COVID-19 and the discovery of vaccines and potential cures . . . I learned so much that I didn’t know before—above all, I met the subtle warriors of the laboratory who are working to save all of us from the horror of new pandemics.”—Richard Preston, bestselling author of The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer Winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize • One of Publishers Weekly’s top ten science books of the season The urgency of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic has fixed humanity’s gaze on the present crisis. But the story of this pandemic extends far further back than many realize. In this engrossing narrative, epidemiologist Dan Werb traces the rising threat of the coronavirus family and the attempts by a small group of scientists who worked for decades to stop a looming viral pandemic. When virologist Ralph Baric began researching coronaviruses in the 1980s, the field was a scientific backwater—the few variants that infected humans caused little more than the common cold. But when a novel coronavirus sparked the 2003 SARS epidemic, and then the MERS epidemic a decade later, Baric and his allies realized that time was running out before a pandemic strain would make the inevitable jump from animals to human hosts. In The Invisible Siege, Werb unpacks the dynamic history and microscopic complexity of an organism that has wreaked cycles of havoc upon the world for millennia. Elegantly tracing decades of scientific investigation, Werb’s book reveals how Baric’s team of scientists hatched an audacious plan not merely to battle COVID-19 but to end pandemics forever. Yet as they raced to find a cure, they ran into a complicated nexus of science, ethics, industry, and politics that threatened to derail their efforts just as COVID-19 loomed ever larger. The Invisible Siege is an urgent and moving testament to the unprecedented scientific movement to stop COVID-19—and a powerful look at the infuriating factors that threaten to derail discovery and leave the world vulnerable to the inevitable coronaviruses to come.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has infected more than 219 million people and killed more than 4.5 million people worldwide. It has also impacted the socioeconomic status of affected countries and led to the fastest development of vaccines in history. Over seven sections and seventeen chapters, this book comprehensively reviews numerous aspects of COVID-19, including epidemiology, zoonosis, drug development, telehealth, the effects of the virus on healthcare workers, the importance of architecture, and urbanism in preventing future pandemics, and much more.

In the final days of 2019, a new and deadly virus was quietly spreading through the city of Wuhan, China. Within six months it would kill half a million people worldwide, infect a further 10 million, and change the way all of us live, work and play forever. Now, for the first time, the real story of the greatest global crisis of the age can be told. Reporters Dylan Howard and Dominic Utton, collaborating from New York and London—infection hotspots in what would become two of the worst-hit nations on Earth—have together mapped the rise, spread and impact of the virus . . . and uncovered some explosive revelations. COVID-19: The Greatest Cover-Up in History—From Wuhan to the White House delivers the unfettered truth about what is undoubtedly the biggest political scandal of our time. It shows in unprecedented detail how governments in China, the UK, and the US not only failed to protect their citizens from the threat of the disease, but actively conspired to put their own political and economic ideologies above the lives of ordinary people. From early attempts by Beijing to silence any reports of the new virus to the inability of the WHO to act decisively; from warnings received and ignored by President Trump to decisions taken by the UK government that directly led to the loss of tens of thousands of lives; from whispers of military experiments to outlandish 5G conspiracy theories, Howard and Utton separate fact from fiction, science from hysteria, and expose a trail of dead bodies, wilful mismanagement, incompetence, arrogance, deliberate cover-ups, and outrageous lies that raise serious questions about who is really responsible for the hundreds of thousands killed by COVID-19. Through vigorous investigations, dedicated reporting, and exclusive first-person sourcing, COVID-19 unearths a more complex understanding of the rise, spread, and consequences of the first six months of the pandemic than has yet been seen, and exposes shocking revelations about the roles and motivations of the American and British governments in the crisis. The true story of COVID-19 is not just that of a silent killer that suddenly invaded the world . . . it’s the scandal of a global tragedy that could have—and should have—been prevented. The real number of deaths and infections from the virus will never be known. The figures have not only been underreported in China, but by supposedly transparent governments in the West for reasons less connected with public safety and more to do with their own mendacity, incompetence, and corruption. Written with the urgency and tension of a thriller novel but grounded in rigorously factual reporting, COVID-19 is the essential read on the most horrifying scandal of our age.