The Covid pandemic almost certainly began with a leak from a laboratory, probably in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, some time in the autumn of 2019. The evidence is voluminous, detailed, precise and devastating, as I and others have catalogued. The CIA, FBI, German intelligence and the former head of MI6 all say they think it started with a lab leak.
So do many scientists, they tell me privately, but fearful of the threats to their careers that they risk if they speak out they dare not say so publicly.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology was planning exactly the right kind of experiment on exactly the right kind of bat virus at exactly the right time to create this virus – with exactly the wrong level of biosafety precautions. It would be a bizarre coincidence if it happened naturally in that very spot at that very time, leaving no trace in any animal other than human beings.
Outside China the only people still with their heads still in the sand, trying to pretend this debate is not even happening, are senior members of the scientific and media establishment. Nature magazine, the house journal of the scientific profession, ran an article last week about four lessons for virology to learn from the pandemic without even mentioning the lab leak theory – which is like learning four lessons from the maiden voyage of the Titanic without mentioning the iceberg.
The Royal Society has refused my requests that it organise a debate on the possible cause of the worst pandemic in a century; so has the Academy of Medical Sciences, of which I am a fellow. Five scientific journals have now rejected papers summarising the evidence that I have co-written with Dr Alina Chan of Harvard and Professor Anton van der Merwe of Oxford. Initially the journals said it was that it was a worthless conspiracy theory; now they say it’s old news.
Boris Johnson told me in 2021 he was repeatedly pressed by his scientific advisors to sign off a declaration that it did not come from a lab – and refused. One of those advisors, Patrick Vallance, is now a government minister in the House of Lords. He has never explained why, after joining a notorious phone call with Anthony Fauci and the Wellcome Trust’s Sir Jeremy Farrar on 1st February 2020, when the strong possibility of a lab leak was raised by several scientists, he chose to dismiss such suspicions.
That call resulted in a paper known as Proximal Origin, which was published five years ago this week, designed specifically to quash all further speculation about the lab leak despite its lead author’s private misgivings that a lab leak was “still friggin likely”.
Why does it matter? Mainly because unless we learn lessons it could happen again. The longer some scientists refuse to debate it, the longer dangerous experiments continue. Only last month, the journal Cell published the results of a risky experiment by Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute on a MERS-like virus, apparently without even asking whether it was done with appropriate biosafety. Virology labs are spreading like mushrooms and scientists are resisting attempt to increase regulation. There are plenty of international rules about ethics in labs — and almost none about safety.
Crucially, also, a lab leak could explain why Covid was so hard to control. When viruses first infect human beings they are usually not very infectious even if they are lethal: this was true of Ebola, MERS, SARS, Nipah, bird flu and others. Each virus takes time to perfect the molecular keys with which to unlock our cells, time during which we can usually employ contact tracing and quarantine to halt the outbreak.
Covid, by contrast, was highly infectious from the very start, as Alina Chan was the first to argue, spreading faster than flu and making a mockery of all our efforts to contain it. That suggests it had been trained on human cells in the lab. The Wuhan scientists had been collecting bat viruses, swapping their genes, infecting human cells with them and infecting humanised mice with them for several years. One such experiment had increased the infectivity of a virus 10,000 times.
Paradoxically, there could be a glimmer of good news here – but only if we learn the right lesson. It could be that such trained and manipulated viruses can cause pandemics that not even lockdowns can halt, whereas food markets or cave tourism will cause local outbreaks that are easy to interrupt. So if we stop doing crazy experiments on dangerous viruses in city centres we could ensure fewer future pandemics.
The World Health Organisation used to worry about this. Its scientists went on record frequently in the late 2010s to express concern that the next pandemic could start in a lab. Michael Ryan, director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, said in 2015 that “the last three clusters of SARS cases…that nearly started SARS again were two laboratory accidents in which lab workers infected themselves and nearly infected their own communities. So the accidental release of pathogens is probably much more significant.”
The EcoHealth Alliance, which funded work at the Wuhan institute and has now been debarred from federal funds by the US government, had said in 2017: “The threat from lab-enhanced viruses is intensifying”.
Mystifyingly, WHO has stopped saying that. You can search its website in vain for similar comments since the pandemic. Yet our government is still using the existence of WHO as an excuse for not even investigating the lab leak theory. It told this newspaper this week that “The UK continues to support the World Health Organisation in its ongoing expert study of the origins of Covid-19.”
It said the same thing to me in 2021 when I raised the matter in the House of Lords. Yet that WHO “study” consists of a dithering, dilatory and disgraceful committee called SAGO that has produced nothing useful in five years. WHO’s only memorable contribution to the debate was a farcical press conference in 2021 in Wuhan at which its team endorsed an absurd Chinese government theory that Covid reached China on frozen fish from abroad and rejected a lab leak as “extremely unlikely”.
When the pandemic began WHO was embarrassingly sycophantic towards Xi Jinping and the Chinese government, praising “the deep commitment of the Chinese people to collective action.” Dr Ryan said he had “never seen the scale, the commitment of an epidemic response at this level”; Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general, said “we always ask for political commitment, political leadership. That’s what we have seen”.
Yet at the time not only was the Chinese government covering up critical details about the outbreak, it was also concealing vital information about the work of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and refusing to share the institute’s database.
The shocking truth is that senior western scientists are too afraid of China and too obsessed with protecting the reputation and funding of science at all costs to be trusted with investigating what happened. Remember this virus killed roughly one thousand times as many people as the worst industrial accident of all time, the Bhopal chemical leak of 1984. It is time for Lord Vallance to show some courage.