the lab matt ridley variants. how has the covid 19 virus has mutated over the time we've known about? and it, by the way, did it exist prior to us knowing about it. well as, far as we can tell it did not exist the form it is what do know is there are some 96% similar viruses in bats. okay, so the bulk of virus is out there in wild bats. but the weird thing about this virus, it's not very good at infecting bats. so something has happened to it between bats and us to change its genes by about two or 3%. and that's enough and that's enough to make it highly adapted to us. and to not to bats. now, we don't know where that happened. as i say, we think it looks increase like it happened in the laboratory because they were doing exactly the right kind of experiments at exactly the right time. when exactly right kind of virus. the closest the nine closest relative to cells to in the world before the pandemic broke out. we're in the freezer of the wuhan institute of virology. now, that's probably telling you something. now

. >> matt ridley when we started a conversation about "viral" he said chileans of dollars are. what did he mean by that? >> if you shut down the world economy for your to have for several periods duringou that te you were going to set back prosperity by trillions of dollars. that's what i mean by that. it costs a lot of money. we spend a lot of money and put the glass and masks and redundancy and airline employees were laid off and all these things add up to a huge cost on the economy even when you don't takeun into account the human cost, the dead, the people who were made ill. >> has the international public health system writ large lost interest insc discovering how ts virus came about and how to prevent the next one and have we moved on? >> my concern is yes there's not nearly enough investigation going on. i know of no major research university that is applied for grants to investigate the origins of this disease and that's extraordinary. i was told by a senior scientist in the uk that we may never find out. and i said why would you say that about this? i don't want to off

we want to introduce you to matt ridley the copy of this book "viral" the search for the origin of covid-19. what do you do for a living? >> i'm retired from most things. i've write looks and i was a journalist. these days i see myself as a writer. do you have a scientific background? >> i do. i've a ph.d. in biology and research. i've spend a lotbe of time beina scientist so i was in the economist and the columnist for "the wall street journal." >> who was your co-op there? >> she is ama fascinating womana young brilliantt researcher a canadian by birth by. chinese by ancestry and she was doing interesting work on the source of the concept the origin of covid. i reached out to her and ended up proposing to her when we wrote about because we are convinced that it was wrong to rule out the source. nor could they rule it in. we began to collaborate on this book. the wrote a book without media. >> welcome to the 21st century. >> it was published in the u.s. in 2021. obviously we paint loss of ideas back and forth across the atlantic and it was a wonderful experience. i've never cowritten a

the lab matt ridley variants. how has the covid 19 virus has mutated over the time we've known about? and it, by the way, did it exist prior to us knowing about it. well as, far as we can tell it did not exist the form it is what do know is there are some 96% similar viruses in bats. okay, so the bulk of virus is out there in wild bats. but the weird thing about this virus, it's not very good at infecting bats. so something has happened to it between bats and us to change its genes by about two or 3%. and that's enough and that's enough to make it highly adapted to us. and to not to bats. now, we don't know where that happened. as i say, we think it looks increase like it happened in the laboratory because they were doing exactly the right kind of experiments at exactly the right time. when exactly right kind of virus. the closest the nine closest relative to cells to in the world before the pandemic broke out. we're in the freezer of the wuhan institute of virology. now, that's probably telling you something. now