It is a lonely place for any journalist to challenge the accepted narrative — particularly when that means questioning two global powers and some of the most eminent scientists on the planet over the origins of a pandemic.
That is why it has been heartening to watch my argument gain ground: that it was reckless to dismiss the possibility that Covid-19 may have escaped from a laboratory. That case was built through investigations carried out alongside other dissenting voices across the world.
Today, few serious observers wave away the lab-leak hypothesis, even as China continues to conceal crucial information. The shift became harder to ignore after the CIA joined the FBI and the US Department of Energy in concluding that the unusually well-adapted coronavirus was “more likely” to have emerged from a Wuhan laboratory than from an animal spillover.
German intelligence and France’s academy of medicine have reached similar views. Given the enduring consequences of the pandemic, the search for the truth must be relentless if we are to better protect the world from future threats.
Yet when I began investigating Covid’s origins six years ago, the very suggestion of a laboratory link was denounced as racist and dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
Like many others, I found it impossible to ignore the extraordinary “coincidence” that the outbreak began in the same city as a secretive laboratory holding the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses and conducting high-risk experiments designed to increase infectivity.
This newspaper can be proud of publishing a series of important reports that revealed links to US funding, raised concerns over weak safety standards in Wuhan, exposed the duplicity of China’s dictatorship and highlighted studies challenging the official account.
The debate is still not settled beyond doubt. But one fact is now unmistakable: there was a concerted effort to mislead the public, involving prominent scientists and research-funding institutions in both Britain and the United States.
Cover up: It was foolish to ignore the hypothesis Covid-19 might have leaked from a laboratory, writes Ian Birrell. Pictured: Researchers working in Wuhan’s secretive Institute of Virology
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is at the centre of hypothesis that Covid-19 might have leaked from a laboratory
These powerful figures hastily pushed statements into influential scientific journals to refute suggestions Sars-CoV-2 – the strain of coronavirus causing Covid-19 – might be linked to ‘any laboratory-based scenario’.
But now we can see how central players in this sordid scandal reacted as their claims were shredded.
The release last week of private chats on the Slack messaging app in an inquiry led by Rand Paul, chairman of the US Senate Homeland Security Committee, shows how they feared the possibility of a lab leak despite their public stance dismissing it.
Still they sneered at critics. I am called ‘a knob’, ‘bully’, ‘that f***er’, a ‘low IQ individual’ and ‘a piece of s***’ among the infantile insults shared by these scientists for having the audacity to ask questions.
Others get worse abuse – with the ‘F’ word used 189 times.
They also talk about frustrating Freedom of Information (FOI) requests – an activity that has already led one US protagonist to face federal charges.
‘Birrell wrote a letter to the Principal threatening to write about it [the non-disclosure of documents] so the lawyer just wants to make sure everything is in place to tell him to p*** off,’ says Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University, in one missive after my FOIs were rejected on risible safety grounds.
So this publicly funded higher education institution – which boasts about its ‘culture of openness’ – helped stifle investigations into the worst public health disaster for a century.
And bear in mind this professor is one of the world’s most-cited scientists. ‘Stay off emails,’ he says at another point, displaying contempt for any concept of transparency. ‘Or carefully curate some emails for the FOI records.’
Sadly, such arrogance and attitudes became all too prevalent during the pandemic – helping shatter public confidence in both science and government.. Rambaut was one of five authors of the Proximal Origins statement published by Nature Medicine in March 2020.
It became one of the most cited articles in academic history after ruling out a lab leak.
It has since emerged they were covertly marshalled by former US presidential adviser Anthony Fauci alongside his boss Francis Collins, director at the time of the biggest American medical funding body, and Sir Jeremy Farrar, then head of the wealthy Wellcome Trust and now chief scientist at the World Health Organisation.
Patrick Vallance, the Government’s then chief scientific adviser, was another key figure. When I tried to obtain his emails, minutes and notes on this issue through FOIs, I received 32 emails with almost every word redacted.
Three months after the Nature Medicine statement, however, lead author Kristian Andersen put odds of a lab leak at 30 per cent.
‘Our paper was pretty strong in saying ‘there’s no way’, but I have less confidence in that statement at this stage,’ he told colleagues.
This Danish immunologist remained dismissive about the lab leak theory in public, telling Sky News soon afterwards that ‘as we describe in our paper, all the data strongly suggest that this is a natural virus’.
Privately, he also admitted they made a false claim on bat coronavirus research: ‘We… say that this work is performed ‘all of the world’, but that isn’t true – it has exclusively been going on at WIV [the Wuhan Institute of Virology].’
Andersen even says ‘they created the virus’ when discussing Fauci and Collins – and admits ‘most scientists I talk to believe there is a likely connection to the lab’.
This would be more shocking if plenty had not already emerged about their deception. Farrar talked privately about ‘Wild West’ biosecurity in Wuhan. Andersen admitted the lab escape theory was ‘so friggin likely’.
Suspicions were raised initially by the ‘furin cleavage site’ on the virus, which made Covid highly infectious to humans but not seen on similar coronaviruses.
Then it was discovered scientists in Wuhan and key Western collaborators sought US funding to insert this feature into Sars-like viruses a year before its spread.
‘It really isn’t beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff,’ admits Rambaut in these latest messages. ‘We just need to re-convince ourselves it is coincidence.’
Another strange coincidence in this saga. Yet it seemed odd to rule out the leak theory after frequent incidents of lab-acquired infections – especially when this disease appeared hundreds of miles from the nearest colonies of bats with similar coronaviruses.
It is now beyond doubt that this clandestine cabal of scientists used their prominence to push a false narrative dismissing plausibility of a lab leak and ‘conspiracy theories’ to protect their backs.
If the pandemic began with a lab accident, this was a human error.
Yet China’s subsequent cover-up was unforgivable – as were the useful idiots who assisted its duplicity in the West.
They betrayed both humanity and the creed of science – and they deserve only shame and retribution.
