One morning in April 2020, Ranawaka Perera cooked fried eggs and tomatoes for his wife, Li-Meng Yan. When she said she wasn’t hungry, he pressed her to eat anyway. Lately, Yan had been so anxious that at times she felt she could barely breathe, and Perera was worried about her health.

Everyone they knew was stressed in early 2020. The couple both worked at a prestigious lab at the University of Hong Kong, where they researched viruses, including an alarming new coronavirus that was spreading around the world.

But Yan was convinced that the prevailing theory that COVID-19 had emerged from a live-animal market in the city of Wuhan, China, was false, and that the truth was much darker. She believed the Chinese government had purposefully grown the virus in a lab and released it to set off a

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