Whatever happens over the next few months, Andy Burnham’s government is a major improvement on its predecessor in one significant regard: it has shed the arrogant science minister who was so contemptuous of the public.

Patrick Vallance resigned on Monday, citing “personal reasons”, just as it emerged that Burnham was preparing to scrap the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and fold its responsibilities back into the business ministry. The decision was met with predictable dismay from his allies in Big Pharma and the scientific establishment. “Patrick Vallance has been an outstanding voice for science in Government,” declared Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society.

The reality is very different. Vallance should never have been appointed to the post after playing a central role in this century’s most outrageous scientific scandal: the attempt by a group of prominent figures to stifle debate over the origins of a pandemic that led to an estimated 20 million deaths and global economic pain.

As Britain’s chief scientific adviser throughout the pandemic, he was at the heart of the gang of scientists who pushed a discredited theory that Covid-19 could be traced back to a market selling wild animals in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus began in late 2019. These people used their positions to brand any dissident scientists, researchers and journalists who dared to challenge their stance as “conspiracy theorists” for their refusal to rule out the lab-leak hypothesis.

Yet the owlish Vallance — who became a familiar face in Britain thanks to his frequent media appearances during the pandemic — was elevated to the House of Lords and placed in the heart of Government by Keir Starmer after Labour’s 2024 election triumph. This was despite being in the secretive group marshalled by former US presidential adviser Anthony Fauci and Jeremy Farrar, who was then head of the Wellcome Trust research body and is now chief scientist at the World Health Organisation.

These powerful scientists pushed statements in influential journals that refuted suggestions that the origin of Sars-CoV-2 was linked to “any laboratory-based scenario” and attacked “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. Operating in tandem with a Chinese regime that covered up the initial outbreak and frustrated subsequent inquiries into its origins, they were assisted in their efforts by supine politicians, publishers and journalists who were fooled by their expertise and failed to challenge dodgy claims. Evidence only emerged of the cover-up and funding ties to high-risk coronavirus research in Wuhan through leaks, investigations and Freedom of Information requests.

At the centre of this real Covid conspiracy was Vallance — a man who loves to talk about the importance of transparency in science yet who consistently refused to answer my questions on his role in trying to crush debate on the pandemic’s origins. When I tried to obtain Vallance’s emails, minutes and notes on this issue through Freedom of Information, I received 32 emails with almost every word blacked out. Then he refused to answer 20 detailed questions, responding only with a few bland lines on the need to find Covid’s origins to help prevent future pandemics.

We now know that Vallance had informed intelligence agencies in the early weeks of the pandemic of suspicions that this deadly virus might have come from a laboratory. In public, however, he dismissed the theory that the virus might have leaked from a laboratory after being engineered, saying that its biology “does not look like that” and insisting the idea that it was a designed virus was “very, very, very unlikely”.

Even last year — after the CIA joined the FBI and the US Department of Energy in declaring it was “more likely” to have leaked from a Wuhan lab — Vallance told the BBC that he still believed natural spillover from animal to human to be the most plausible origin of the catastrophic global pandemic that caused such misery. Never mind the extraordinary coincidence that Covid erupted in a city hosting the laboratory with the world’s biggest repository of bat coronaviruses. Nor that the Wuhan Institute of Virology took its database offline just before the pandemic was detected, had known safety concerns, and was carrying out risky gain of function research part-funded by the US to boost the infectivity of coronaviruses.

Vallance is right about one thing: that science needs to be both rigorous and transparent. And this is why we should celebrate his departure from Government, as he symbolises the betrayal of the public by top scientists during the pandemic.

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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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