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Will We Get to the Bottom of COVID-19's Origin?
Reason magazine|March 2025
WILL THE INCOMING Trump administration and Republican Congress get to the bottom of how the COVID-19 pandemic began? There's every indication that they'll at least try.
Will We Get to the Bottom of COVID-19's Origin?

The idea that the pandemic originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China-and that U.S. government-funded research contributed to the virus's creationhas gone from a derided conspiracy theory to a credible hypothesis with some mainstream acceptance in the past few years.

Thanks to information obtained through congressional probes and investigative journalism, we already know that U.S. government-funded researchers were engaged in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the WIV.

We know the same researchers proposed using federal grants to create viruses with many of the unique features of the virus that caused the pandemic; they even cited the cost-effectiveness of doing so under the Chinese lab's lower biosecurity protocols.

We also know that researchers and their funders at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) tried to evade scrutiny of this work through various dirty tricks aimed at avoiding public records requests and indulging in word games about the definition of "gain-of-function" research.

Two U.S. federal agencies, the Department of Energy and the FBI, rank a lab accident as the most likely explanation of the origin point for the pandemic. The Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic concluded the same in its final report released in December 2024.

Nevertheless, none of these assessments are definitive. There's still a lot we don't know.

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Denne historien er fra March 2025-utgaven av Reason magazine.

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FLERE HISTORIER FRA REASON MAGAZINESe alt
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Reason magazine

Google Is Big. Is That Bad?

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Reason magazine

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FOR TEENAGERS IN IRAQI KURDISTAN AND ELSEWHERE, IT'S MORE THAN JUST A GAME.

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10+ mins  |
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Florida Drug Deaths Surged on Pam Bondi's Watch
Reason magazine

Florida Drug Deaths Surged on Pam Bondi's Watch

WHEN PRESIDENT DONALD Trump announced his nomination of Pam Bondi as attorney general, he extolled her \"incredible job\" in \"work[ing] to stop the trafficking of deadly drugs and reduc[ing] the tragedy of Fentanyl Overdose Deaths.\"

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1 min  |
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The Strange Case of The Immortality Key
Reason magazine

The Strange Case of The Immortality Key

THOUGH THE SCIENCE journalist Michael Pollan called the book \"groundbreaking,\" Brian Muraresku's The Immortality Key is largely a rehash of others' work shaped into a Da Vinci Codestyle thriller.

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8 mins  |
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Reason magazine

LOVE, MONEY, AND SURROGACY

EVELYN AND WILL Clark met after college through mutual friends.

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10+ mins  |
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Reason magazine

Trump vs. California: Round 2

CALIFORNIA WAS ONE of President Donald Trump's largest foes during his first term; the state sued his administration over 120 times.

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2 mins  |
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The Future of AI in the Trump Administration
Reason magazine

The Future of AI in the Trump Administration

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP'S deregulatory impulses could be a boon to the AI industry, but his hostility to free trade threatens to undermine its progress. Policies from the first Trump administration and caustic campaign rhetoric caution against unqualified optimism.

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you can't Evict Polly
Reason magazine

you can't Evict Polly

HOW THE FAIR HOUSING ACT ENABLED THE RISE OF EMOTIONAL SUPPORT PARROTS, FROGS, AND EMUS

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Gay Penguins Face the Ban Hammer
Reason magazine

Gay Penguins Face the Ban Hammer

ONE FLORIDA SCHOOL district is facing a legal battle over its decision to ban a book about gay penguins.

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