Fever: The Hunt for Covid's Origin - 3. Uncertainty and Trump

US President Donald Trump wades into the Covid origins debate.

It’s April 2020 and at the podium of the White House’s press room, Donald Trump makes a geopolitically incendiary claim: he has a high degree of confidence that the origin of the virus that causes Covid is the Wuhan Institute of Virology - a Chinese government lab. But scientists seem certain that can’t be true. So what is the evidence for both claims? And what were the scientists publicly dismissing a lab leak saying in private?

Archive: The White House; C-SPAN; CBS.

Presenter: John Sudworth
Series producer: Simon Maybin
Editor: Richard Vadon
Sound design and mix: James Beard
Commissioning editor: Dan Clarke
Science advice: Julian Siddle and Victoria Gill
Extra production: Eva Artesona and Kathy Long
Research support: Zisheng Xu and BBC Monitoring
Production coordinators: Siobhan Reed, Helena Warwick-Cross, Sophie Hill, and Debbie Richford
Theme and original music: Pete Cunningham, with trumpet by Joss Murray
Radio 4 Editor of Editorial Standards: Roger Mahony
Head of BBC News - Long Form Audio: Emma Rippon

Published on Tuesday, 13th June 2023.

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