Viral

“Chan and Ridley write with urgency in defending why people ought to take the SARS-CoV-2 lab-leak hypothesis seriously…That urgency 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

“Viral collates a series of circumstantial but damning points in favour of the lab-leak hypothesis.” – Sunday Times (London)

“Chan and Ridley’s new book is a viral whodunnit that is sure to appeal to armchair detectives.” – The Guardian

“Alina Chan and Matt Ridley assemble perhaps the most comprehensive case for the lab-leak theory currently available.” – Wall Street Journal

“Both journalists and armchair detectives interested in the mystery of the coronavirus were discovering Chan as a kind of Holmes to our Watson. She crunched information at twice our speed, zeroing in on small details we’d overlooked, and became a go-to for anyone looking for spin-free explications of the latest science on COVID-19.” – Boston Globe Magazine

Matt Ridley’s books–including The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, How Innovation Works, and most recently, Viral: the Search for the Origin of Covid-19 (with Alina Chan)–have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages, and won several awards. He sat in the House of Lords from 2013 and 2021, and was founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He created the “Mind and Matter” column in the Wall Street Journal in 2010, and was a columnist for the Times. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Northumberland.