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Science is packed with committees deciding on ethics… but there are few that decide whether it is safe “I am officially launching my new company: Cathy Medicine. We will eradicate diseases in future generations through germline gene editing.” This is one of several strongly and strangely worded tweets sent in recent days from the Twitter […]

At the Royal Calcutta Turf Club, where ghosts of British Nabobs look out over the racecourse, my neuroscientist wife spoke to an audience of businessmen in support of Robin Sengupta, a pioneering Newcastle neurosurgeon. He has founded a world-leading Institute of Neurosciences in Kolkata where richer patients subsidise poorer ones. After a morning meeting doctors […]

Appeared in The Telegraph; https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/12/06/explosive-truth-about-origin-covid-19-emerge/ Trump’s new lieutenants, Jay Bhattacharya and John Ratcliffe, are convinced that a lab leak was probably the source It is now five years since we woke to the news of a new outbreak of infectious pneumonia in China. Retelling the story of those early days of the Covid pandemic helps […]

Opponents of the lab-leak theory have comprehensively lost the argument. What was the worst industrial accident in history? Bhopal in India, where in 1984, at least 25,000 people died as a result of a leak of methyl isocyanate from a pesticide plant? No, if – as most people who have examined the evidence now believe […]

Under questioning from Congress, two key figures have unwittingly strengthened the lab-leak theory. Two of the key figures in the story of Covid’s origins gave away vital new information last week before the US Congress. One of these figures is Ralph Baric, the University of North Carolina professor who invented ingenious techniques for genetically altering […]

As a US Senate committee’s full, 300-page report on the origin of covid now makes clear, a whole string of clues now points towards a laboratory accident as the probable cause of the covid pandemic.   For example, there is: evidence of a biosafety crisis at the lab in the autumn of 2019; the Chinese […]

The Lancet Commission is the latest to highlight how seeking the truth has come second to other considerations   The Lancet Commission into “lessons for the future from the COVID-19 pandemic”, written by 40 scientists and public health experts, and chaired by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, has concluded that “the origin of the virus remains […]

There doesn’t seem to be a smoking gun in the latest ‘evidence’ The BBC carried a story this week with the headline ‘Covid origin studies say evidence points to Wuhan market’. Bizarrely the paper in Sciencethey are referring to, by Michael Worobey and colleagues, says no such thing. It says: ‘the observation that the preponderance of early cases […]

The revised and expanded paperback edition of my newest book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, co-authored with the brilliant scientist Alina Chan, is now available to purchase in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. It was a privilege to help Alina write Viral, and a privilege to create this […]

Lessons have still not been learned, so why should we trust the WHO in a future pandemic? My article for Telegraph: On 22 May, the World Health Organisation meets for the World Health Assembly, an annual summit to which all the world’s countries are invited – except Taiwan, which is excluded at China’s behest. On […]