How a Lab Leak Could Cause the Next Covid-Like Pandemic
Five years after the first cases of Covid-19, there are still serious risks in experimenting on viruses to boost our knowledge.
Illustration: John Provencher for Bloomberg
With uncanny timing, Adam Kucharski’s book The Rules of Contagion: Why Things Spread (Profile Books) landed in stores in February 2020, just as the world was dealing with Covid-19. Kucharski, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, described how ideas take off, how political movements gain momentum — and how viruses become pandemics. This Next Chapter considers the benefits — and disadvantages — of lab experimentation and how this kind of testing could go wrong.
Six years before the original SARS virus appeared in Hong Kong, a three-year-old boy with a fever arrived at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Kowloon. It was May 1997, a few weeks prior to the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China. It would turn out to be a new biological era as well as a new political one.