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By Ibram X. Kendi Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 400 pages, $20 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.

By Claire Hoffman Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 384 pages, $32 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.

The paper was a product of a conference among about a dozen high-level scientists convened Feb. 1, 2020, by Jeremy Farrar, who was then director of the Wellcome Trust, a British health research foundation, and is now chief scientist of the World Health Organization.

Farrar’s goal was to foster a discussion of initial concerns voiced by several virologists that features of the virus appeared to be man-made.

The GOP report notes that in his 2021 book “Spike: The Virus vs The People,” an inside look at the British response to the pandemic, Farrar refers to a paper co-written by Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina and Zhengli Shi, a top official at WIV, as a “how-to manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory.”