Online and book event at the Reagan Library with Matt Ridley and Dr. Alina Chan

Please join us for a virtual event with Matt Ridley and Dr. Alina Chan on their new book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 (Publish Date: November 16, 2021). Signed copies of their book can be purchased through our website’s registration process. Register for the event and/or to pre-purchase a book. The event will be livestreamed on our YouTube channel at www.YouTube.com/ReaganFoundation.

In Viral, authors Matt Ridley and Dr. Chan look into where COVID19 came from and how it first jumped into people. In this uniquely insightful book, a scientist and a writer join forces to try to get to the bottom of how a virus whose closest relations live in bats in subtropical southern China somehow managed to begin spreading among people more than 1,500 kilometers away in the city of Wuhan. They grapple with the baffling fact that the virus left none of the expected traces that such outbreaks usually create: no infected market animals or wildlife, no chains of early cases in travelers to the city, no smoldering epidemic in a rural area, no rapid adaptation of the virus to its new host—human beings. The result is a gripping detective story that takes the reader deeper and deeper into a metaphorical cave of mystery.

Matt Ridley is an award-winning author, an economist, and a columnist for The Times and The Wall Street Journal.  Dr. Chan is a molecular biologist who specializes in gene therapy and cell engineering.