Mick Hartley

From the Telegraph – Wuhan lab leak 'now the most likely origin of Covid', MPs told:

A laboratory leak is now the more likely origin of Covid, MPs have heard, because after two years of searching an animal host has never been found.

Speaking to the Science and Technology Select Committee, Dr Alina Chan, a specialist in gene therapy and cell engineering at MIT and Harvard, said there was also a risk that Covid-19 was an engineered virus.

Dr Chan, said: “I think the lab origin is more likely than not. Right now it’s not safe for people who know about the origin of the pandemic to come forward. But we live in an era where there is so much information being stored that it will eventually come out. 

“We have heard from many top virologists that a genetically engineered origin is reasonable and that includes virologists who made modifications to the first Sars virus. 

“We know this virus has a unique feature, called the furin cleavage site, and without this feature there is no way this would be causing this pandemic.

“A proposal was leaked showing that EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were developing a pipeline for inserting novel furin cleavage sites. So, you find these scientists who said in early 2018 ‘I’m going to put horns on horses’ and at the end of 2019 a unicorn turns up in Wuhan city.” 

Matt Ridley, co-author with Alina Chan of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, was also on hand.

“We know now that experiments were being done at biosecurity level 2 (similar to a dentist's office) that resulted in 10,000 times increases in infectivity of viruses and three or four times their lethality. The important thing is to stop doing these experiments that are risky.”

During the session, the editor of the Lancet, Richard Horton, was also criticised over a letter published by the journal in 2020 which dismissed the lab leak theory as a ‘conspiracy theory’ and effectively shut down the debate into the lab leak theory.

The letter was authored by Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth alliance, who had worked closely with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) engineering bat coronaviruses. 

Yet despite the close link, it took 16 months for the Lancet to publish a memo setting out Mr Daszak’s conflicts of interest. 

Aaron Bell said the memorandum declaring Mr Daszak’s interests had been ‘too little too late.’

Mr Horton argued it had taken more than a year to ‘persuade’ Mr Daszak to declare that EcoHealth was working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. 

“We ask everybody to declare their competing interest and we take those statements on trust and in this care regrettably the authors claimed they had no competing interest and of course the implication there were indeed competing interests that were significant, particularly in relation to Peter Daszak,” said Mr Horton.

“We take declarations of conflicts of interests on trust. We quickly became aware of Peter Daszak’s conflict of interest and we ended up having a debate with him because his view was ‘Look, I’m an expert working in China on bat coronaviruses and that isn’t a competing interest, it makes me an expert.’

“But in the court of public opinion, that is a competing interest you should declare and it took us over a year to persuade him to declare his full competing interest.”

Mr Horton also said that the lab leak was now: ‘a hypothesis that should be taken seriously and needs to be further investigated.’

Well Horton's changed his tune. In May last year he appeared on the state-owned broadcaster China Central Television to praise how ‘tremendously decisively’ the Chinese Communist party had handled the pandemic. He also penned multiple editorials about China, including one entitled ‘Covid-19 and the Dangers of Sinophobia’.

He also changed his tune on the MMR vaccine and autism, having overseen the publication of Andrew Wakefield's notorious paper linking the two in 1998. It took the Lancet 12 years to retract that one.