China’s stooges: the real Covid conspiracy The lab-leak theory is still being suppressed

We must hope all the evidence available to federal authorities on this weirdly contentious issue will be re-examined with Trump’s restoration — especially given his choice of Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the world’s biggest biomedical research agency that helped fund controversial experiments in Wuhan. The Stanford University health economist and lockdown sceptic has said the evidence for a lab leak is “compelling” while criticising establishment efforts to silence dissident voices.

Unfortunately Trump’s outbursts after the pandemic emerged about “the China virus”, and his promotion of daft ideas such as injecting disinfectant to treat Covid, made it easier to ostracise experts who dared question the orthodoxy of natural zoonotic transmission. The concept of an accidental lab leak became bound up in frenzied talk of bioweapons and malevolent activities. Yet his last administration concluded with a carefully worded State Department statement raising valid questions about sick scientists and risky research in Wuhan.

Dismissal of a possible lab leak — and for this to become such a sectarian issue — was always a curious stance in the absence of any firm proof. There were, after all, more than 300 known laboratory-acquired infections and 16 escapes of pathogens in the first 21 years of this century. The same year that Covid erupted in Wuhan, 10,000 people fell ill following leakage from a veterinary research centre in another Chinese city. Even in the weeks before Covid emerged, Farrar and Fauci helped oversee a WHO report highlighting growing risk of global pandemic from an escaped pathogen, which pointed out how scientific advances allowed “disease-causing micro-organisms to be engineered or recreated in laboratories”.

A quick reminder of some facts: Wuhan was home to one of China’s two maximum bio-security labs — and hundreds of miles from the nearest colonies of wild bats with most similar coronaviruses. Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) contained the world’s biggest repository of bat coronaviruses, had known safety concerns and conducted high-risk “gain of function” research to boost the infectivity of mutant bat viruses in humanised mice. Its database of 22,000 samples and many unpublished sequences was taken offline in September 2019 — when some believe the virus emerged.

Yet Farrar was among 27 scientists who signed a now-infamous letter in The Lancet praising Chinese experts for their “rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data” and condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was later found to have been covertly organised by Peter Daszak, whose New York-based EcoHealth Alliance funnelled US taxpayer dollars to WIV, following a teleconference call on February 1 2020 that sparked efforts to discredit lab leak theories.

This call was organised by Farrar in tandem with Fauci and Francis Collins, then head of NIH. Under their guidance, four participants and one other expert wrote a notorious Nature Medicine commentary saying they did not think “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. Yet it emerged later that these scientists feared a lab link was ‘“so friggin’ likely” even as they drafted their statement. Farrar complained about “Wild West” biosecurity in Wuhan with Collins. And a senior adviser to Fauci told Daszak he had learned how to make emails “disappear” from freedom of information requests “so I think we are all safe”.

Tragically, every sliver of evidence that has slid into the open since the pandemic has chipped away at public faith in science and politics thanks to the cavalier attitude of certain scientists, the arrogance of self-serving experts, and the complicity of a cabal of prominent figures attempting to deceive the world. Boris Johnson, prime minister during the pandemic, now says “the awful thing about the whole Covid catastrophe is that it appears to have been entirely man-made”. Yet still Lord Vallance — who, as his chief scientific adviser, joined that clandestine teleconference call — was elevated to the House of Lords and appointed science minister by Keir Starmer last year. Needless to say, my freedom of information requests to find out more about his involvement have been thwarted.

We still do not have a conclusive answer to the conundrum of Covid’s origin, despite growing acceptance of a possible lab leak. Yet this remains a crucial debate, important both in terms of accountability for a global public health disaster and to assist protection from another pandemic in the future. There have been jitters again in recent days over fresh scenes of Chinese hospitals overrun with masked people after a surge in cases blamed on flu-like human metapneumovirus — although unlike Covid, this is not a new disease, so there will be levels of immunity in the population from previous infections.

We should not forget, however, this attempted concealment of facts was exposed only by the diligent efforts of a few brave scientists, dissident journalists, data experts and online investigators prepared to challenge the consensus. As one of those involved, I was even subjected to a Facebook shadowban for one UnHerd investigation, which was labelled misinformation until I protested. It was gratifying to be recognised later in Congress as the first to lay out the lab leak hypothesis in mainstream media — but how depressing to see the sluggish response from many colleagues that still clouds this issue.

Most significantly, it was the Drastic group of investigators who released the Defuse research project dating from 2018. This sought to create viruses with the defining feature of Sars-CoV-2: the furin cleavage site that allows its spike protein to bind so effectively to cells in many human tissues and is not found on any of the other 800 known Sars-releated coronaviruses. The proposal came from EcoHealth, WIV and Ralph Baric, the University of North Carolina coronavirologist who pioneered such controversial gain of function research. It was rejected by US funders. Yet Shi Zhengli, the leading bat disease researcher at WIV, refused to answer when asked by a German reporter last year if she had pressed on with such experiments, claiming the issue had “nothing to do with the origin” of Covid.

This was a dynamite discovery. It showed that scientists in Wuhan with their long-standing US collaborators proposed to construct genetically modified coronaviruses. And hey presto — one year later, a novel Sars-related virus emerged suddenly in their city. It was either the most stunning coincidence — or a smoking gun. Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, was among those experts who saw this document and its drafts as the “blueprint for creating the virus that causes Covid-19”.

Yet still there is a cabal of scientists and media allies pushing the idea that the virus flared up in Wuhan’s bustling wet market. “We first believed the virus originated in the seafood market, but now it looks like that the market is just another victim. The virus existed [before the infections happened in the market],” said George Gao, head of China’s Centre for Disease Control, in May 2020.

Gao, an Oxford-educated virologist, later published a paper confirming that no animals tested positive from 1380 samples collected there in January 2020, adding that positive environmental samples they collected had been derived from infected humans, not animals. And even Baric – the world-leading expert who had warned US biosecurity chiefs that a lab leak might have caused the pandemic before WHO had declared a worldwide public health emergency, later told Congressional investigators that he believes the market was just “a conduit for expansion”.

But the theory keeps bouncing back like a bad penny. “Once you lose the market as the origin, all bets are off,” said Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University, in private discussions among the Nature Medicine authors. Yet his colleague Eddie Holmes, a British biologist at the University of Sydney who had visited the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, said “no way” there could have been sufficient selective pressure to evolve a furin cleavage site there due to “too low a density of mammals” with small clusters of three or four animals kept in cages. As another of the team said, this begs the “million dollar question”at the core of the creation and spread of Sars-CoV-2.

First they blamed the pandemic on pangolins, then they turned the spotlight on raccoon dogs, which had been seen in the market by Holmes. Last year, there were excitable new headlines over a scrap of data obtained by Chinese researchers. ‘“Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic,” declared The Atlantic. “New data links Covid-19’s origins to raccoon dogs at Wuhan market,” reported The Guardian. “Have we found the ‘animal origin’ of Covid?” asked the BBC breathlessly.

The answer turned out to be no. The presence of these critters in the market was so well known it was even mentioned by WHO during its negotiations with China for access. The new report simply showed again that raccoon dogs and other mammals susceptible to Sars-CoV-2 were sold in Wuhan before the market was shut down on 1 January 2020, while saying that positive swabs from the market also contained trace quantities of genetic material from raccoon dogs. “Now we have definite proof that animals were there that could carry coronaviruses at the time of the outbreak,” insisted Peter Daszak, whose organisation is now blocked from US federal funding after misleading officials over work in Wuhan. “It’s another piece of evidence that the market was where it began, not the lab.”

Then the Chinese researchers posted their own analysis of the data. It confirmed yet again the presence of raccoon dogs on sale in the market. “However, these environmental samples cannot prove that the animals were infected,” they wrote emphatically. “Furthermore, even if the animals were infected, our study does not rule out human-to-animal transmission, as the sampling was carried out after the human infection within the market. Thus, the possibility of potential introduction of the virus to the market through infected humans… cannot yet be ruled out.

Many experts believe a debunked idea is being pushed as a deliberate diversion. “The incessant fixation on the market by one group of virologists — to avoid having to admit the science was compromised from the beginning — is preventing any other scenarios from being properly examined lest you are labelled a conspiracy theorist,” said molecular biologist Sigrid Bratlie, a strategic adviser on biotech to Langsikt Policy Centre in Oslo who admits to being astounded by the scale of efforts to suppress the lab origin theory.

Astonishingly, there still remains no conclusive proof over how this virus exploded in Wuhan. Yet we do know Beijing’s dictatorship tried to cover-up the initial outbreak, and then blocked outside investigations of the origins. Scandalously, we have discovered this disturbing obfuscation over Covid’s origins was assisted by some of the most prominent figures in Western science. This was the real conspiracy — and it is still being pushed today by the Chinese Communist Party’s useful idiots.

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Ian Birrell is an award-winning foreign reporter and columnist. He is also the founder, with Damon Albarn, of Africa Express.

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