Investigative journalist and author Elaine Dewar was drawn to controversy

Investigative journalist Elaine Dewar was not content to sit out the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown in her comfortable Toronto home doing nothing. Even before the novel coronavirus arrived in Canada, she was skeptical of official reports claiming that a few sick bats in a single Chinese food market in the sprawling city of Wuhan had triggered a pandemic that encircled the globe in a matter of months. And so, she did what she did best – she started digging. Twenty months later, her book On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation hit stores and the news media.

Recalling her longtime friend’s work ethic in a eulogy, reporter Marci McDonald, remembered “she relished the chance to bore deep into what seemed to me absolutely impenetrable legal, academic or scientific documents.”