EVENT DATE: April 13, 2022
TOPIC: The Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation

Elaine Dewar is the author of seven non-fiction books, numerous magazine articles, and scripts for television. She has been honoured by nine Canadian national magazine awards, including the prestigious President’s Medal, the US based White Award for investigative journalism, awards from the Canadian Archeological Association and The Canadian Nurses’ Association, and the Hilary Weston Prize for narrative non-fiction. Most recently she was a finalist for the Governor General’s non-fiction award.

She describes her new book as the most difficult she’s ever written. Locked down in Toronto by the very pandemic whose cause she was investigating, she was forced to resort to I.F. Stone’s methods, combing through published sources instead of the kind of face-to-face interviews that usually lead to good stories. She ploughed through mounds of newspapers, government reports, peer-reviewed science journals, preprints, and the blacked-out responses to access-to-information requests to answer a very basic question: Had SARS-CoV-2 come from nature i.e. an infected animal in a wet market in Wuhan, China, OR had it come from a lab in the same city? Early on, a second question arose: Was there a connection between the origin of the pandemic and the mysterious and still unexplained firings of two scientists from the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg?

From the beginning she questioned “official responses”, and, to put it mildly, met roadblocks through her entire investigation. We heard , on April 14 Ms. Dewar’s conclusions.