Mick Hartley

Through the latest Covid enquiry, no one seems interested in what is surely the biggest scandal of them all. Of course we can't be certain, but for a while now it's been clear not only that the lab leak theory is plausible, but that it's the most likely cause of the pandemic. A virus deliberately manufactured by scientists in a laboratory, let loose through incompetence to kill millions of people – a sci-fi nightmare turned reality – and no one cares. The politicians are ridiculed – for my money no politician, let alone Johnson and his crew, could have emerged well from facing such horrendous choices about having to shut society down – but, as always, they're the easy targets.

Matt Ridley, co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, at Spiked:

The more I think about it the more enraged it makes me. Back in late November, senior Tory minister Michael Gove was slapped down by the UK Covid inquiry’s head counsel, Hugo Keith, for raising the issue of where the virus originated. ‘There is a significant body of judgement that believes that the virus itself was man-made, and that presents challenges as well’, Gove said.

Gove was, I think, making the point that the question of Covid’s origins ought to matter to the inquiry. That’s because a laboratory-derived virus, being already trained on human cells, is bound to spread faster than one that has just jumped from an animal. And SARS‑CoV‑2 was unusually infectious for a pathogen new to the human species.

‘We’re not going to go there’, said Keith quickly, shutting Gove down. But why not go there?

Imagine, if you will, something similar happening in India after the Bhopal disaster in 1984, when thousands of people died after a cloud of toxic gas spread over the city following an accident at a pesticide factory. At the public inquiry set up to examine the response of the government to this disaster, ministers are grilled by a barrister about what they said to each other on that day, on why they did not stockpile enough medication, on why they were so slow to respond and so on. One of those ministers says, meekly: ‘There is a significant body of judgement that believes that the accident was not just an act of God but was caused by corporate negligence.’ ‘We’re not going to go there’, says the lawyer….

Pandemics are not acts of God. Somebody somewhere did something that caused the virus to enter the human species. The evidence that this virus probably came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is now voluminous, detailed and strong. That an outbreak caused by a bat sarbecovirus should happen in the one city in the world that had been collecting hundreds of bat sarbecoviruses and experimenting on them is striking enough. That it happened one year after that lab proposed inserting the one feature that distinguishes SARS‑CoV‑2 from all other viruses of the same kind makes it a heck of a coincidence. That the virus was highly infectious from the start, highly attuned to human receptors and evolving comparatively slowly, implying it had been already trained on human cells, was a shock. That the lab in question refuses to this day to release the database of the viruses it had been working on is as insulting as it is suspicious.

The coincidences of time and place are truly spectacular. The leading laboratory for bat sarbecoviruses in the world is not in Baltimore, Birmingham or Bombay. It is in Wuhan. When foot and mouth disease broke out near Pirbright in the UK in 2007, where the world’s leading reference laboratory for the foot-and-mouth virus is situated, it wasn’t a coincidence. When anthrax broke out downwind of a Soviet bioweapons factory in Sverdlovsk in 1979, it wasn’t a coincidence. When brucellosis broke out in Lanzhou in 2019, right by a brucellosis vaccine factory, it wasn’t a coincidence. And when smallpox infected a medical photographer at a smallpox lab in Birmingham in 1978, it wasn’t a coincidence. Lab leaks happen all the time. SARS itself leaked from labs after the end of the SARS epidemic of 2003 at least six times – once in Singapore, once in Taiwan and four times in Beijing.

Yet the vested interests in ignoring and dismissing the possibility of a Covid lab leak are legion. They include the Chinese authorities, the World Health Organisation (which obsequiously does President Xi Jinping’s bidding these days), and the American scientific establishment – especially Dr Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases who funded some of the work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They also include EcoHealth Alliance, a New York non-profit headed up by Peter Daszak. EcoHealth Alliance has trousered millions of US taxpayer dollars since the SARS outbreak of 2003 for collecting viruses all over south-east Asia and sending them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, all the while boasting of WIV’s gain-of-function experiments, which increase the infectivity of viruses.

A new leak suggests that Dansak, a central figure in the whole saga, had discussed pursuing gain-of-function research at lower safety levels at Wuhan.

Daszak and colleagues planned to harvest wild bat viruses of exactly the same kind that later caused Covid, soup them up in the lab, infect human cells with them and do so at low biosafety levels that would ‘freak out’ other Western researchers. They planned to do all this in a city called Wuhan. And since then, they have chosen not to tell the world that this is what they had proposed.

The coincidences continue to mount. So in sum, a global pandemic began in 2019 very close to a lab that was doing risky, gain-of-function research on the very same kind of virus as Covid. Since then, the scientific and public-health establishment has tried to shut down debate on the origins of the virus and has refused to talk about the risk of lab leaks. The silence speaks volumes.