The UK is oblivious to the truth regarding Covid’s ancestry. A number of indicators point to a laboratory accident as the likely cause of the pandemic, as made obvious by the complete 300-page report of a US Senate committee investigating the origin of Covid.
( The UK is oblivious to the truth regarding Covid’s ancestry ).
For instance, there is evidence of biosafety concerns at the lab in the autumn of 2019; the Chinese government’s refusal to disclose information about the disease’s early human cases in November of the same year; persistent reports from US intelligence that these cases include lab workers; the apparent beginning of vaccine development in China before the outbreak was even declared; and the Chinese government’s astonishment lack of cooperation in the investigation of the origin.
( The UK is oblivious to the truth regarding Covid’s ancestry ).
Add to these: the failure to find infected animals in markets or on farms; the revelation that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) brought about 200 kinds of bat coronavirus to Wuhan; the risky nature of the research they did to combine the genes of new viruses with existing ones and test them on human cells and humanised mice; the surprising finding that the virus which causes Covid has a unique genetic feature that happens to be of the kind that the Institute had been inserting into other viruses; and the blank refusal of the WIV to share its database of viruses it was working on with the outside world after taking it offline in late 2019.
Despite the best efforts of a small group of Western virologists who collaborated with the WIV to shut down the debate in the West and label a lab leak a conspiracy theory, the matter will not go away.
( The UK is oblivious to the truth regarding Covid’s ancestry ).
Yet the British science establishment and Government, normally so ready to boast of our reputation as a biomedical research hub second only to the US, has done nothing to contribute to this debate.
I cannot think of a single significant addition from our universities and institutes, except the strange role that the Welcome Trust played in convening a meeting in February 2020, where attendees appeared to agree to mislead the public about the plausibility of a lab leak.
( The UK is oblivious to the truth regarding Covid’s ancestry ).
With the US government arguably compromised by allegations that it funded the very work in the very lab in Wuhan that is under suspicion, there was a golden opportunity for British scientists and spies to step in as honest brokers and weigh the evidence. Yet they refused to do so.
When I urged one leading scientific body at least to debate the matter, it politely declined. When I urged another to investigate, it told me the topic was “too controversial”. Nature, Britain’s and the world’s premier science journal, has confined its reporting to condescending dismissal of all discussion of lab leaks.
( The UK is oblivious to the truth regarding Covid’s ancestry ).
When I asked a senior scientist to help wake the establishment up to the biggest enigma science has faced in decades, he said he thought it was vital we do not find out what happened lest it annoy the Chinese government.
This is not the stance anybody would take over an accident to an airliner, a chemical plant or a nuclear reactor. Yet unlike such accidents, the pandemic killed millions.
One eminent scientific organization graciously denied my request for it to at least be discussed. I urged another to look into the matter, but it responded that it was “too controversial”. The leading scientific journal in both Britain and the rest of the world, Nature, has limited its reporting to a patronizing dismissal of any discussion of lab leaks.
Of course he is right about the reason for our reticence. The Foreign Office is in permanent kowtow. Our universities and science journals are directly or indirectly dependent on Chinese funds and infested with people who seem to admire authoritarian communism. Senior scientists are worried that admitting a lab leak is plausible would damage the reputation of science. To which I say: not half as much as trying to cover it up.
