Mick Hartley

Heroic scientists battling against stupid and venal politicians seems to be the story everyone wants to tell, as we start to look back on the pandemic. Jeremy Farrar's book Spike: The Virus vs. The People – the Inside Story is the latest addition to the growing chorus . Farrar is director of the Wellcome Trust, an expert on emerging infectious diseases, and a member of the UK's pandemic advisory group, SAGE. His book excoriates the Johnson government for its handling of the Covid-19 crisis, and has been garnering positive reviews.

But, as Ian Birrell argues in UnHerd, Farrar himself has some questions to answer – in particular about his role in the stifling of the lab-leak hypothesis. 

In September 2019, even as a new respiratory virus may have started circulating in a central Chinese city, some prominent figures issued a wake up call to the world about the risks of a pandemic. The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, a group of 15 politicians and scientists brought together by the World Health Organisation, warned that a new disease could spread rapidly around the planet, killing millions of people while sparking panic, crippling economies and destabilising security. “The world is not prepared for a fast-moving, virulent respiratory pathogen pandemic.”

The board members included Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, alongside George F Gao, director-general of China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, and Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and presidential adviser. This was not surprising: Farrar is an expert in tropical diseases as well as head of Europe’s biggest philanthropic research funding body and a sure-footed political operator in the world of public health. His £29bn foundation also helped cover costs for the board.

They were, of course, proved right almost instantly. Sadly, their report came too late to achieve its valiant aim of stepping up preparation for a pandemic given the speed of Covid-19’s spread from Wuhan last year. Yet their words were astonishingly prescient. And among the risks highlighted by these experts were the technological advances that “allow for disease-creating micro-organisms to be engineered or recreated in laboratories”, warning how their accidental release might be more devastating than a natural epidemic: “Accidental or deliberate events caused by high-impact respiratory pathogens pose global catastrophic biological risks.”

History shows that labs can leak. So it is strange that Farrar, like his two expert friends, has played such a pivotal role in stifling suggestions that this new virus might have come from a laboratory rather than emerged through natural zoonotic transmission from animals. Spike: The Virus v The People — his book co-authored with Anjana Ahuja from the Financial Times — is a rather self-promotional work, lambasting the politicians he has been advising as a member of Sage for their failures in handling the disease, although his defence of publication seems valid. “Everyone needs to learn the lessons, scientists included,” he writes. “We only honour the dead by pledging to learn from the mistakes that cost them their lives. Protecting lives, and our way of life, is infinitely more important than protecting reputations.”

Such was his fury with government actions last summer that Farrar sent a memo to colleagues about the need to “be honest and transparent”. So why does he decline to answer questions about his own actions in early days of this pandemic that led to the crushing of discussion over possibility that it might be the result of some kind of incident involving one of Wuhan’s laboratories? These include Wuhan Institute of Virology, the biggest bat coronavirus research unit in Asia that was carrying out risky experiments and had known safety concerns. 

“It was odd for a spillover event, from animals to humans, to take off in people so immediately and spectacularly in a city with a biolab” writes Farrar — especially with a new virus that “seemed almost designed to infect human cells”. Many others had similar suspicions — and in recent weeks, such concerns have started being taken more seriously.

Yet Farrar was one of the signatories of the infamous Lancet letter last February, organised by Peter Daszak, condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. And he went out of his way to praise the Chinese response, tweeting in mid-January that“China deserves great credit”, and claiming two weeks later that it was “setting a new standard for outbreak response and deserves all our thanks”.Yet the reality was that China was doing all it could to obfuscate, and silencing whistle-blowers.

Murky waters. However poor the political response, there does seem to be the suggestion now of scientists rallying round and closing ranks, deflecting any possible blame away on to the easy target of the politicians.

The more we learn, the stranger these events seem to become. The one point of agreement in this fierce debate on the origins is that it is vital to find the truth so the world can be better prepared for pandemics — as those 15 experts warned us weeks before the pandemic erupted. More and more scientists, along with politicians and journalists, have come to accept the lab leak hypothesis is not a conspiracy theory and merits serious investigation until the facts prove otherwise — especially after Donald Trump’s accusations were echoed by his Democrat successor Joe Biden.

Despite Farrar’s initial concern, and his involvement in the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, he sees things rather differently. He insists “the evidence strongly suggests that Covid-19 arose after a natural spillover event”, although adding that we must ensure labs are safe. “The tragedy is that this entire controversy over the origins of the pandemic coronavirus turned out to be a distraction,” he concludes defiantly. “The conspiracist blame game was a fig leaf to disguise the failure of American governance.”

Yet for all his certainty, there are valid fears that we may really have been given an unwelcome glimpse of the failures of China’s governance — and the curious role of a Western scientific establishment in suppressing a crucial debate.