June 21, 2021 - 5:57pm
Sir Patrick Vallance has had a good pandemic. The country’s chief scientific officer pushed hard for early lockdown, came up with the idea for a vaccine task force that proved such a triumph and has looked consistently assured in the media spotlight.
Now he has been rewarded with a new post of national technology adviser, handed a mandate to replicate the successful vaccine procurement programme in other areas. This popular character will also run a new Office for Science and Technology Strategy to drive Whitehall’s strategy with a brief from prime minister Boris Johnson “to cement the UK’s place as a global science superpower.”
This appointment makes perfect sense. Yet there is one niggle that Sir Patrick needs to clear up: what was his role in the strenuous efforts of the global scientific establishment to stifle debate on the origins of the pandemic?
It is now clear that leading experts, backed by supine journalists and politicians, pushed the idea that those daring to challenge the dominant view — that Covid 19 was definitely a natural spillover event from nature — were conspiracy theorists for arguing that the possibility of a laboratory leak in Wuhan should not be ruled out.
The dissidents have now been vindicated amid acceptance that both theories remain valid. Yet we have seen that leading scientific figures colluded to argue against the plausibility of “any type of laboratory-based scenario”, as one influential commentary in Nature Medicine stated. At the centre of events lies a mysterious teleconference led by Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, early last year that was joined apparently by Vallance.
This emerged from emails obtained from Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases chief. The teleconference was called after he was sent a long article on January 31 that detailed how researchers were investigating genomes to unravel the virus’s beginnings. It examined also controversies over risky ‘gain of function’ experiments and discussed the work carried out by Professor Shi Zhengli at Wuhan Institute of Virology with her British partner Peter Daszak in sampling thousands of bats and finding hundreds of new coronaviruses.
This led to a flurry of emails from Fauci — and then Farrar setting up the urgent conference call for the pair of them the next day with 11 other global experts. The Wellcome boss insisted their conversations were confidential. They also discussed contacting Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organisation.
Two days after this discussion, Dr Tedros delivered a sudden call to “combat the spread of rumours and misinformation”. Three days later, Daszak began circulating a note enlisting signatories for a Lancet statement published the following month that attacked “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It only emerged later from another tranche of emails that Daszak co-ordinated this statement, which was signed by Farrar and 25 others.
Also on the conference call was Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at Scripps Research Institute in California. When Fauci sent him the article, he responded that the genetic sequences of the new virus showed “some of the features (potentially) look engineered.” He added that other experts agreed the genome was “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”. Yet he was lead author on that Nature Medicine note. Intriguingly, Farrar admitted to me he helped convene its authors.
So what was discussed at that mysterious teleconference? Unfortunately, vast chunks of the Fauci emails that might reveal the answers were redacted and Farrar had declined to reveal the details. When I tried to find out more from Vallance, his press people told me I had to submit a Freedom of Information inquiry. Yet as he has said “openness and transparency around this disease is a social imperative” — especially now that it has become so entwined in issues about trust in science.
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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SubscribeInteresting article and I’m in sympathy with it.
A minor point, but worth pointing out I think, the population density of France is not 11 persons per square km, it is 119. While for England it is just short of 280 persons.
I remembered this from my arguments relating to the difference between the UK and Sweden (22 persons per square km), and their different lockdown strategies.
Attention to detail! Thank you.
He means the population in rural areas, not nationally. (A previous article when he mentioned this he specified it.)
And where do they live? Packed into urban areas, that’s where. They’re not in the country.
Are these per sq. km figures relating to the total land area, or to habitable land? This makes a big difference. Most of Scotland, for instance, is literally uninhabitable.
I agree, that would be a useful distinction to make, but I’m pretty sure that, in general, “population density” figures are calculated on total land mass.
If so, they cease to play any part in meaningful observations on the effects of mass immigration on resident populations. The actual figures will be significantly higher. I am maybe being suspicious when I think that this might not entirely be an accident.
Not really the topic, but people in Sweden, mainly live in cities. Stockholm is pretty dense and in the 3 months i spent there in 2020 I never saw a mask. So….strategy had very little to do with density.
oddly, it was in Norbotten….high up north that the numbers were the highest, also, one of the least dense populated province in the country
And back to the topic…city people know squat about country life in France and we are now facing people coming to live in the country complaining from cow dung smell, church bells at 7 am and roosters chanting on their heap of manure.
Go home !!
If re-wilding were ever to take off in the States, the idea of vast natural areas where the only humans permitted are scientists and academics is not gonna fly. Some hybrid design is called for with room for hikers and even hunters.
A wise “method”, more neglect than method, is to limit access through the difficulty of the terrain, the lack of roads and the obscurity of the locations. In the NYC area I know of beautiful places I can go that, even in the height of summer, are empty of people. If the only way to get there is walking, and the route is hard to follow, the number of visitors falls off dramatically for every half mile or so of drudgery. If we’re talking about a very large area of widerness, simple geometry dictates that it will be a very lonely place. Which is just what we want it to be.
If you’re ever in California you might want to drive up to the Lost Coast (about 200 miles north of the Bay Area). There are only rough, unpaved roads that are almost impassable in winter but certainly accessible in summer. Lots of hikes and even on a ‘busy’ day you’ll find yourself one of only a handful of people walking the beaches. Be careful, though, some parts of the beach completely disappear when the tide comes in. Take a tide chart.
The author may be right about hunting. But why be another writer writing about the “membrane thin” species barrier, without pausing to consider the abyss opened by activities like writing?
It’s not only writing. It’s conversant language as a whole, something unavailable to animals, who can only signal.
Interesting article. I grew up in rural West Tennessee and although I went home at night, I spent much of my time in the woods when I wasn’t hoeing or picking cotton. In those days, there were zero deer. Since then, thanks to stocking, there are probably more deer than there were when pioneers like David O. Crockett settled there. There are also wild turkeys, which were not there when I was growing up. The author is correct about thinning. Although there were no deer where I lived, there were deer 50 miles or so away along the Tennessee River. There was one place inside a wildlife management area that was so heavily populated the deer were starting to have problems finding food. Similar situations have occurred all over the United States as large deer herds have come along. The fact is that deer and other wild animals have to be hunted or they overpopulate. There are animals and birds that have thinned but its due more to agricultural practices and the ever-increasing development than to hunting. Where I now live in Texas was rural farmland when we bought our house twenty years ago. Now it’s all houses. And new residents complain about the snakes, alligators and wild hogs that live around us.
Distinguish please between hunting with firearms and Hunting on horseback: the latter is the ultimate equestrian challenge, riding at speed in close proximity to fellow riders and horses, over daunting obstacles, and can only be done otherwise on a racecourse. It attracts as much misunderstanding as envy, as the vast majority of people who may be able to handle a rifle, shotgun, or for that matter golf club or tennis raquet, simply do not have the skills, let alone nerve and courage…. or ability to sustain and overcome physical injury, to even imagine riding, let alone riding over 4 and a half foot of hedges at 25 mph plus in blinding rain…
‘Re-wilding’ implies that humans and their creations are not ‘wild’ But in fact there is no difference whatsoever in relation to external behaviours and envionmental changes. ‘London’ is just as ‘wild’ as a thing as an ant-hill (which also, by the way, ‘destroys existing habitat’). It’s just that humans also live different ‘internal’ lives, which are more varied and important.
His Book sounds like a fascinating insight into wild life in his unique experience and the extract I read in ‘The Guardian’ confirms this.
The characterisation of rewilding here as anti-human seems disingenuous – rewilding doesn’t mean expelling humans from the area you’re rewilding or restoring a mythical pristine nature. It just means trying to restore an area to being a functional ecosystem that humans can also participate in in a sustainable way.
Yours is is not a definition recognised by all proponents of re-wilding, sadly. As with all proposed reforms, approach and application of principle lie on a fairly broad continuum.
That said, I recognise your definition and it’s certainly one with which I can find sympathy. Indeed, in the longer term, I wonder if it’s one to which circumstances may force us, regardless of willing participation.
“Rightly, Delorme accords the beasts agency and personality, and tells us a great, humbling truth: despite our self-congratulatory self-labelling as homo sapiens sapiens (“doubly wise humans”) we are still animals, and the species barrier can be membrane thin.”
So our language (animals cries and calls are not ‘language’, they are signals, a form of semiotics) doesn’t really affect our relations with animals or or way of life? Just remember, we are the only animal that can contradict. Achieving this (or did we bring it with us?) was the biggest event in world history. All animals are trapped in an eternal, meaningless, contextless, present, unable to choose or resist what happens to them to any marked degree. To me the ‘barrier’ is in fact a vast, uncrossable gulf.
Plus you mistake the second ‘sapiens’ for a ‘reinforcement’, but in the Linnean system it signifies merely a subspecies (which may not be any more ‘sapiens’ than any other subspecies of Homo sapiens, that might have existed in the past).
To me the lesser known joy of hunting is the free provision of sandaloid evo woke tree hugger quarry who one can annoy, tease and bait ad nauseam, and provide endless hours of entertainment! The ruder, more vicious and insulting they turn, the better the sport! I cannot for the life of me fathom why people dont revel in being ” trolled”? Its so rewarding!!