This is great news. But America and the world can’t celebrate unreservedly — because Fauci himself is unlikely to face criminal jeopardy, owing to a sweeping preemptive pardon granted him by President Joe Biden. Yet that doesn’t rule out other forms of accountability for Fauci, such as civil torts. A deeper reckoning, moreover, may shed light on the creepy, long-running nexus between biological research and America’s national-security state.

Last week, Dr. David Morens — a senior adviser to Fauci during the Covid years at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, part of the National Institutes of Health — pleaded guilty to charges that he conspired with two other people to hide evidence and defy public-records laws. The evidence in question: emails between Morens (and other government-linked scientists) and the British zoologist Peter Daszak, the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that used US government grant money to fund so-called gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to a report from the House subcommittee on the pandemic.

Gain-of-function research involves combining different viruses to create dangerous hybrids, justified on the grounds of better understanding future infectious diseases. At least one US intelligence agency — the CIA — has already concluded that the novel coronavirus likely leaked from a Chinese lab doing just such work. And it is also reasonable to at least suspect that the US government’s funding of the EcoHealth Alliance was part of intelligence efforts to keep tabs on Chinese research. 

According to the Department of Justice, Morens and two unnamed co-conspirators agreed “in writing to intentionally hide their communications from public view by corresponding using Morens’s personal gmail account, rather than his official NIH email account.” This was done, as the conspirators themselves made clear, to evade the transparency requirements of the Federal Records Act and the possibility of future exposure under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA.

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Among other things, Morens and his conspirators were trying to hide details related to a NIAID grant that helped fund experimentation with bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or WIV, in China. One of these bat coronaviruses may have been a precursor to the Covid-19 virus, which likely escaped from the WIV in 2019.

Many of the incriminating communications have been posted online by the oversight committee of the US House of Representatives. Numerous emails implicate Fauci himself in the effort to evade public-records and transparency laws. For example, an email from Morens to a group of fellow scientists, including Daszak, dated April 21, 2021, contains the following: “PS. I forgot to say there’s no worry about FOIAs. I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail or hand it to him at work or at his house. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.”

Another email, from May 13, 2021, to the same group of scientists discusses having a friendly journalist “interview Tony [Fauci] directly and connect him to our ‘secret’ back channel. He emailed Tony a few days ago.” This suggests rather routine illegal use of private communication systems to coordinate official pandemic messaging, an effort in which Fauci himself was involved.

Daszak — widely suspected but not confirmed to be one of the unnamed conspirators — appears in many of the emails in which avoiding transparency is mentioned. An email dated April 21, 2021, from Daszak to a group of five other government-employed or -connected scientists, reads in part: “Please feel free to share any docs that I’ve sent to you, with Tony [Fauci]. Hopefully you can do that in a way that avoids [the Freedom of Information Act], and if not possible, just show him stuff on screen share on Zoom.”

In another email, Morens, referring to Fauci, tells Daszak; “If he needs further info, it might be best to connect you two, in an off-the-record manner. Would that be OK? We are getting FOIA’d nonstop, so it’s most important that Tony [Fauci] not have anything on the record that could come back to bite.” Daszak responded: “Totally agree. Tell him I’m happy to speak with him at any time and will do so in a way that’s not FOIA-ble.” 

In an email from November 18, 2021, Morens says: “Please pass this on to Peter [Daszak], and I ask you both that NOTHING gets sent to me except to my gmail, and make sure that what gets sent to my gmail doesn’t have a cc [carbon copy] to another government employee who could be FOIA’d.” There are many more statements of the kind in the public record, thanks to House investigators. 

The scientists’ obsession with secrecy, their fear of public scrutiny, tells us much about the politics of this pandemic. These people are fundamentally authoritarian. They despise democracy. They epitomize the arrogance of scientism: the worldview that treats science not as a means to gather certain kinds of facts, humble in the face of what it doesn’t know and subject to future revision — but as a total worldview, offering definitive answers to all questions, including the nonscientific, and elevating the expert himself to the status of a demigod. 

Their research was reckless. They suspected trouble. And they tried to hide it.

Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance are important in themselves and also because of the larger dynamics they reveal in the history of Covid’s origins. According to Dr. Andrew G. Huff, a former vice president of EcoHealth Alliance-turned-whistleblower, the nonprofit was heavily involved with a USAID program called PREDICT, which ran from 2009 to 2019, and billed itself as an early warning system for zoonotic pathogens that might emerge from nature. 

Parallel to PREDICT, Fauci’s NIAID also wrote a grant for $8 million directly to EcoHealth Alliance so that it could help fund research into bat coronaviruses being conducted by Shi Zhengli, a senior scientist at the Wuhan institute. This research seems to have included gain-of-function enhancements on some of the bat viruses that may have made them more dangerous to people.

To be charitable, if collecting intelligence on China’s infectious disease research was the plan, the US government did manage to get inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was then one of China’s top virology labs. Less charitably, the government did so by using US taxpayer money to fund dangerous research in a sprawling and poorly run lab. While the Wuhan Institute of Virology did have Biosafety Level 4 laboratories in 2019, it also had numerous less secure facilities in the same building; some of the bat-virus research is alleged to have occurred in these lower-safety level labs.

In this light, the pandemic can be seen as the ultimate iatrogenic disaster. In an effort to combat pandemics, a secret arm of the government may well have funded research that inadvertently produced the very thing it was trying to prevent: a massive, deadly, economy-crashing pandemic.

It isn’t too far-fetched to imagine that the Trump administration, and especially health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr., are now deeply ambivalent about the nature of the government’s likely efforts to keep track of other countries’ bioweapon research. On the one hand, if such spywork is funding dangerous research in order to get inside foreign laboratories, it can lead to unintended consequences … like a global pandemic. On the other, rival states and private actors do, in fact, conduct dangerous biological research that the US government might want to be apprised of. 

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A better way to mitigate the whole problem would be to refurbish the international treaty against biological weapons. That treaty, which outlaws offensive-oriented biological research and was highly effective in an earlier age, has a gaping loophole that allows high-tech biological research to continue as long as it is done in the name of medicine, public health, and biodefense. In other words, the great powers are still making the active ingredients in would-be weapons, but they are not making or testing delivery systems, nor do they deploy pathogens to the battlefield. However, as highly dangerous biological research advances, those old constraints become less important.

To understand how and why, it helps to revisit history. From the end of World War II until the early 1970s, the US government, along with most of its large allies and peer competitors, maintained offensive-oriented biological-weapons programs. During the pandemic, liberal journalists went out of their way to scoff at any mention of “bioweapons,” as if such a thing had never existed. But it did, and it is all a matter of public record.

However, by the late 1960s, American military leaders had turned against these so-called germ bombs, seeing biological warfare as dangerously unpredictable and dangerously accessible. In fact, the US brass referred to biological warfare as “the poor man’s nuke.” A number of accidents, including the mass poisoning of a herd of sheep in the American West, had led to public outcry from not only hippies, but heartland squares as well.

When Richard Nixon arrived at the White House in January 1969, he was met by large and persistent peace vigils demanding an end to US biological-warfare programs. Ten months later, in November 1969, Nixon announced the “unprecedented” unilateral end of America’s biological-weapons program. Quickly thereafter, the United States launched international negotiations aimed at ending bioweapons programs everywhere. In 1972, the Biological Weapons Convention was agreed to. All signatory states were compelled to end their offensive research and to destroy their offensive biological weapon stockpiles by March 1975.

The treaty has mostly been a success. But there was that one loophole. States could continue doing research on dangerous pathogens as long as this was for the creation of “defensive medical countermeasures.” For a long time, this loophole meant little, in part because the barriers to such research were so high. However, by the early aughts, with the advent of the CRISPR gene-editing technology, dangerous tampering with pathogens became much easier and more common.

As more parties began tampering with pathogens, intelligence agencies around the world became increasingly eager to understand what their adversaries were doing. It is this drive that may have led to America’s probable efforts to access the premier virology lab of Washington’s main rival, China.

Diplomacy brought an end to offensive-bioweapons research among the major powers of the planet. But it left open the defense loophole. Real accountability, and a real reckoning with Covid, could, among other things, clear the path for diplomacy between the world’s great powers to amend the 1972 convention, so that the treaty effectively regulates the dangerous and increasingly accessible technologies of the 21st century.

The need to update the 1972 treaty has grown particularly acute in just the last year. Aided by artificial intelligence, synthetic biology is developing faster than ever, and in very dangerous ways. In July, researchers at the University of Minnesota created the first ever artificial life form, a one-celled organism, capable of limited division and replication, called the SpudCell. It is, as yet, unable to evolve or divide over many generations, which is why scientists don’t consider it fully alive. But that could change.

Less complicated and far more dangerous was news in early August that scientists had created a series of viruses that had been designed by AI. Hopes for medical breakthroughs were raised, but so were safety concerns about new synthetic diseases running out of control.

As Dr. Huff, the EcoHealth Alliance whistleblower, told me over the phone: “Universities in all the G20 countries have the capacity to create totally synthetic viruses. We no longer have to go poking around in nature to find dangerous viruses and then do gain of function on them. It’s now possible to create dangerous viruses from scratch.”

We need sunlight and lots of it on the history of Covid’s origins. This is not just about punishing a group of creepy insiders — though they certainly deserve it — it’s also about reining in and restructuring biodefense research of all sorts.

It’s easy to feel squeamish about discussing these matters. The facts, though well-documented, sound conspiratorial and haven’t broken through to the mainstream press, and therefore might hurt your credibility at the next dinner party. But that attitude is adolescent and painfully upper middle class. Now is the time to face the facts, no matter where they lead. A real reckoning on Covid is the first step towards effectively demanding that our governments refurbish the Biological Weapons Convention and take other steps so as to prevent another biomedical disaster.

The alternative may well be masks, lockdowns, censorship, online schooling, shuttered churches, vaccine passports, and exhortations to snitch on neighbors who fail to comply — in short, mass hysteria and authoritarian overreach all over again. 

And so the biological-industry complex was also born, swept into being as the US started to reckon with the inevitability of biological warfare and bioterrorism — an inevitability that arrived just one week after 9/11, when envelopes of inhalation anthrax were mailed around the country. But, as with the military-industrial complex, the emergence of America’s biodefense infrastructure was about much more than defending against potential threats. It was about anticipating them, understanding them, spying on them, and creating them. In many ways, the sense of urgency echoed the Manhattan Project, which showed just how quickly a “scientific-technological elite” could coalesce around a military project of strategic value. Consequently, American biodefence today spans the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Agriculture, the FBI, the State Department, and the Intelligence Community (not to mention state-level agencies).

Curiously, however, it also appears to have spread into American foreign aid. In April, Samantha Power, the former human rights activist and Obama hand now serving as administrator of United States Agency for International Development (USAID), testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Senator Rand Paul asked: “Did USAID fund coronavirus research in Wuhan?” In response, Power was evasive, referring repeatedly to USAID funding of the Wuhan lab having taken place “before my time”. But Power’s testimony raises a much bigger question: Why was USAID funding risky research in a Chinese lab that the US Department of Energy and the FBI now assess to be the source of Covid at all?

Since the heady days of the pandemic, when top scientists resorted to burner phones and clandestine meetings, journalists have uncovered thousands of pages of redacted emails, deleted virus sequences, and concealed events related to the outbreak of Covid. Among the key revelations of this years-long investigation was the enormous sums of US government funding spent on risky virus research around the world, but with a particular emphasis on China. The vast majority of this money was funnelled through a New York-based NGO called EcoHealth Alliance, led by  British zoologist Peter Daszak. And by far the largest portion of US money channelled through EcoHealth — no less than $65 million — came from USAID. Not even the pandemic could put a stop to investment. As recently as late 2021, well after EcoHealth Alliance had been rebuked by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for improper practices regarding its funding of the Wuhan lab, USAID gave EcoHealth Alliance a further $4.67 million.

This was merely the latest in a long series of funding rounds. EcoHealth received its first installment from USAID in 2009. The money would come from a then-novel USAID programme called Predict, whose mission was to hunt out viruses that jump from animals to humans and could potentially cause a pandemic. Predict was the brainchild of Dennis Carroll, an infectious diseases expert who had run USAID’s Pandemic Influenza and Other Emerging Threats (PIOET) Unit.

Carroll had permanently joined USAID in 2005 — a critical year for the agency, but also for the country. Two years prior, an outbreak of avian flu, or H5N1, had decimated poultry stocks and infected around 1,000 people around the world. The outbreak heightened a sense of terror of biological agents that had gripped the Bush Administration since the anthrax attack. In response, the Bush administration increased non-military biodefence funding from a paltry $60 million 2001 to a staggering $2 billion in 2003 — in addition to $6 billion dedicated solely to the development and stockpiling of vaccines. Just as importantly, with the 2004 presidential directive called Biodefense for the 21st Century, based on the assumption that “a bioweapons attack could devastate America”, Bush would lay the foundations for America’s first biodefence infrastructure.

At USAID, a similarly seismic change was underway. Under the leadership of Andrew Natsios, a longtime Republican political operative who started his career in politics running the 1990 primary campaign of George H.W. Bush, USAID would take a dramatic shift towards America’s defence establishment, becoming “a quasi-security agency”, as British professor of conflict studies Alice Hills wrote in a 2006 paper. This began in 2005 when USAID created its Office of Military Affairs (now the Office of Civilian Military Cooperation). “Uniforms [of US military personnel] in the corridors of the Ronald Reagan Building that houses USAID are now so commonplace they are not even noticed,” Henrietta Fore, the USAID administrator from 2007 to 2009, wrote in Parameters journal in 2008. “This is not the way things used to be.”

In 2009, USAID was forced to ramp up its efforts when another seismic event in the world of biological-threat preparedness took place: a novel influenza virus called H1N1, swine flu, which infected around one billion people and killed tens of thousands. In May 2009, Carroll testified before Congress that USAID had announced the launch of a new Emerging Pandemic Threats (EPT) Program, which would create “a global early warning system for the threat posed by diseases of animal origin that infect humans”. The programme, which in various forms ran until 2019 was slated to consist of four projects: Predict, Respond, Identify and Prevent — with the first, Predict, granted around $200 million in funding over two five-year funding cycles. (A follow-up USAID virus program called STOP Spillover was announced in May 2020 with a $100 million budget before getting quietly shelved.)

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With Predict, USAID sought to “identify the emergence of new infectious diseases in high-risk wildlife, such as bats, rodents, and non-human primates, that could pose a major threat to human health”. Under Carroll’s leadership, however, Predict went much further than identifying the “emergence” of dangerous new viruses. Instead, it started actively hunting them out. It sampled more than 164,000 animals and people and sourced more than 1,100 unique viruses, including strains of Ebola, Marburg, MERS- and SARS-like coronaviruses, 949 of which were not previously known. In doing so, Predict introduced a completely new kind of pandemic risk: giving these deadly, unknown viruses a direct pathway to become introduced to large human populations living nearby.

Given the risk, the benefits would presumably need to be at least as great. But a highly influential 2017 paper by Emma L. Geoghegan and Edward Holmes demonstrated that the predictive value of the programme wasn’t merely of dubious value but of no value at all. “[E]fforts to predict disease emergence commonly conflate fundamentally different evolutionary and epidemiological time scales, and are likely to fail because of the enormous number of unsampled viruses that could conceivably emerge in humans,” the paper stated.

Nevertheless, the programme’s leaders were certain that Predict worked. A 2012 article published by the journal PLOS concluded that, as a result of Predict and EPT: “China has made a series of changes to public health policy and infrastructure specifically targeting SARS-like illnesses… It is likely that any future spillover from SARS… would be less likely to result in international spread.” One of the main authors of the paper was Dennis Carroll. Another was Peter Daszak.

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It would be less than seven years from the publication of that paper before a pandemic would be caused precisely by a SARS-like pathogen originating in China. This raises the very serious question of how the world’s leading experts on pandemics, who commanded nine-figure budgets to monitor populations for exactly this kind of emerging virus, failed to even detect its emergence.

The reality is that Predict was doing more than detecting dangerous pathogens: it was helping labs make them. In May 2021, the office of US House Representative Guy Reschenthaler released a report showing that USAID had funnelled $1.1 million to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) through the EcoHealth Alliance. Among the work funded by USAID was a 2015 study jointly conducted by Shi Zhengli, the infamous “bat lady” of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the University of North Carolina researcher Ralph Baric, which used reverse genetics to insert a spike protein from a wild coronavirus capable of binding to a human receptor into the SARS-1 virus. The new lab-made virus was shown to bind to the human receptors and replicate “efficiently”, according to a House Foreign Affairs committee report.

The 2015 study — which the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists characterised as a “prototype” for making SARS-CoV-2 in a lab — was considered so dangerous that its authors did not upload the resulting sequence to GenBank, the NIH’s genetic research repository, for fear it might “fall into the wrong hands”, as Baric, its lead author, would later attest. But the study also omitted one other critical piece of information: USAID had provided funding for the study. Nature Medicine, the journal that published the paper, was forced to add a “Corrigendum” clarifying that the aid agency had in fact funded it.

Funding this kind of research in China added a whole other dimension of risk. According to the State Department, the Wuhan Institute began collaborating with the People’s Liberation Army no later than 2017. NBC News reported that in spring 2018, the Wuhan Institute’s Shi collaborated with military scientists specifically on coronavirus research. And in April 2020, it was revealed that the Wuhan Institute worked with Chinese military researchers to conduct research on Covid in humanised mice cells for the purposes of investigating the new disease. (US government investigators later found that the mice cells used specifically for Covid testing would have been created in the summer of 2019 — months before the pandemic began.)

There is little doubt that the US had, and still has, a global premium on the equipment, expertise, and ambition to do this type of research. So why would the NIH, let alone the USAID, fund such research in, of all places, a lab in China?

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Among the four pillars of “Biodefense in the 21st Century”, Bush’s strategy that gave rise to programmes like Predict, was one called “Threat Awareness”. It indicated that the US was “improving the Intelligence Community’s ability to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence [on bioweapons]”. Of all places, China would almost certainly be at the top of any list of bioweapons intelligence targets. Though the nation is a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the State Department found in 1993 that its bioweapons activities continued long after its accession in 1984. A 2002 report by The Nonproliferation Review found that one of a number of PRC-connected factories producing bioweapons was located in Wuhan. It was there that Shi Zhengli was conducting her own cutting-edge virus research, though under the banner of scientific research.

While failing to anticipate, or even identify, the Covid pandemic, Predict could have given American intelligence access to the findings of virus researchers such as Shi Zhengli, not just in China but around the world. In which case, given the sums associated with America’s defence and intelligence budgets, the project’s hefty $200 million lifetime budget would have paid for itself.

It wouldn’t have been the first time that international aid programmes have been used to gather intelligence. In 2014, it was reported that USAID had been caught trying to create a version of Twitter in Cuba that would help the CIA influence the political situation, with an eye to overthrowing the government. “USAID, perhaps, is the new CIA here,” Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive’s Cuba said at the time. The programme backfired, eventually allowing the Castro government to spy on the 40,000 Cubans who signed up.

Have USAID’s intelligence efforts failed again? In September 2019, the Wuhan Institute, with no explanation, took its database of viruses offline — a database populated by efforts funded, in part, by Predict. It was only months later, in March 2020, that Predict was brought to a close. But far from being the end of the programme, Predict’s demise was only the beginning of a much bigger and bolder incarnation of it.

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The Global Virome Project (GVP), a $3-billion private venture to “identify and characterize, within a decade, 99% of all zoonotic viruses with epidemic/pandemic potential”, was envisioned as Predict on steroids. Not coincidentally, it was created and led by the same people at the centre of Predict, including Dennis Carroll, Peter Daszak and Predict’s principal investigator Jonna Mazet. Like Predict, the GVP would be rooted in tight cooperation not just with the Chinese government (one of the co-authors of the Science paper announcing its launch was George Gao, then head of the Chinese CDC), but specifically the lab in Wuhan. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology… is the forerunner to the Global Virome Project,” a 2018 State Department cable from the US consulate in Wuhan reported. “China has expressed interest in building the GVP database… Other countries…are skeptical on whether China could remain transparent as a ‘gatekeeper’ for this information.”

In addition to the Chinese government, a core partner in the GVP was health-tech company Metabiota. Led by a PR-savvy “virus hunter” named Nathan Wolfe, Metabiota played a key role in USAID’s Predict, despite having been accused of running a “bungled” response to the Ebola outbreak in 2014. The company received around $24 million in funding from the Department of Defense, funding that is alleged to have been facilitated by Hunter Biden, whose investment firm, Rosemont Seneca, led a $25 million investment round in Metabiota, investing $10 million for a 13% stake in the company. Emails revealed by US Right to Know show that, while building the GVP, Carroll (using his USAID email address) earmarked hundreds of thousands of dollars in USAID funding to Metabiota, possibly in violation of federal law.

Since then, even in the wake of a pandemic that it might have caused, the power of the biological-industrial complex has continued to grow. Funding to EcoHealth Alliance has been fully restored. Everyone from Anthony Fauci to Samantha Power to Anthony Blinken is able to calmly sit in front of a powerful senator and explain that documents regarding the research done at Wuhan, subsidised by USAID, NIH and the State Department, will not, after all, be forthcoming. When I asked USAID about Predict, a spokesperson said: it “focused on understanding viral risk” and lowered “the pandemic risk in several ways”. They also stated: “USAID has never funded gain of function or dual use research of concern activities.” But it still remains unclear what exactly it did fund. With 20 million people dead and the world no closer to answers regarding what actually caused the pandemic — not the scientific method, but the policies, people, and institutional corruption — we can only continue to pose questions that have, for three years, gone glaringly unasked.

For starters, we are still a minority. Over the past year, official reports have confirmed many of our claims that were initially dismissed as disinformation — on the likely artificial origin of SARS-CoV-2, on the futility of universal masking (especially in children), on school closures, on the negative impact of lockdowns, on the possible side effects of the mRNA vaccines, and much more. But most people are not aware of these developments. Instead, they still largely subscribe to the Covid consensus: that the pandemic measures were a necessary, albeit painful, response to a novel virus which we knew very little about. As a recent UnHerd Britain poll revealed, most Britons are still convinced that lockdowns were the right choice.

Will this shift? It seems unlikely, given the vast resources that will likely be poured into consolidating the “accepted story” of the past three years — what we might call the post-Covid consensus. This can already be seen in the media’s hagiographic reports about two of the chief architects of America’s pandemic response, Anthony Fauci and former CDC director Rochelle Walensky, following their recent departures from government. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization and national governments are pushing to increase the power of centralised public health authorities during health emergencies, through the revision of the WHO’s International Health Regulations and a new pandemic treaty. Elsewhere, despite the launching of official Covid inquiries in several countries, including the UK, it seems doubtful that they will lead to anything more than a merry-go-round of buck-passing. The failures committed at the highest level during the “war on Covid” are simply too big to expect states to put themselves on trial.

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Indeed, if the past three years have taught us anything, it is that most of the constitutional safeguards, legal formalities and “checks and balances” that we took for granted can easily be swept aside in the name of “emergency”. That most of the Covid measures are now being curtailed doesn’t change the fact that the potential for a return to boundless executive power is always there. Indeed, perhaps this is the most pernicious legacy of the pandemic: that most people appear to have accepted the fact that democratic norms and practices may be suspended in the name of “public threats”. In other words, the politics of emergency have been normalised.

While the Covid pandemic may be over, then, the Covid paradigm remains very much alive. In fact, we are already witnessing its deployment in the context of new crises, most recently in the emergence of a totalising narrative surrounding the Ukraine war. This points to another uncomfortable truth: that the underlying conditions that made the Covid response possible have not gone away. If anything, they have been exacerbated since the virus struck: the capture of state institutions by corporate interests, the hyper-concentrated nature of our mainstream media, the power of Big Tech and its symbiotic relationship with the repressive apparatuses of the state, and the transfer of power from the national level, where citizens are able to exercise some degree of influence over policy, to an unaccountable supranational level.

In this context, it is worrying to see many of those in the so-called lockdown-sceptic camp drawing misplaced conclusions from the events of the past three years. It has become almost an article of faith among lockdown sceptics to place the blame for the pandemic response on excessive state power — and to conclude that the solution to all our problems is to dramatically curtail the role of the state.

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We profoundly disagree with this conclusion. Of course, Western state institutions have failed in the Covid era — proving to be inefficient, terribly oppressive or both. Yet it seems pretty clear that they failed not because they are state institutions per se, but rather because they have been captured by private corporations and their interests. If the main lesson drawn from the pandemic is that there should be further erosion of the productive and organisational capacities of the state, disaster will surely follow. The worst possible outcome would be the further privatisation of public services, allowing private interests to further distort public institutions through “revolving door” policies and close government ties to biotech companies. Such an approach ignores the fact that private corporate power can be just as tyrannical as state power. In fact, many of our problems can be traced back precisely to the deregulation of big business of the past decades, which has led private corporations to exercise significant control over our lives.

To see how this corrupts the public sphere, consider the rise in conspiracy theories around the mRNA vaccines. Many of these, suffice it to say, are deeply disturbing. However, as we observed in The Covid Consensus, a main driver of these conspiracies has been the enormous secrecy with which Western governments have shrouded the entire Covid vaccine process — ranging from the original trial records to the contracts signed with vaccine manufacturers to the question of vaccine injuries. Secrecy is by definition an element of conspiracy, and with governments refusing voluntarily to divulge any of this information except when legally challenged, it’s clear that this has influenced the rise of the conspiracies, and general distrust in public health.

What’s particularly disturbing is the reason generally cited by Western governments to support this secrecy: corporate confidentiality. When Vikki Spit — whose partner had been recognised by UK agencies as having died of a blood clot to the brain after taking the AstraZeneca vaccine — requested information about why the company had requested indemnity from litigation, the UK government responded: “The requested information contains commercially sensitive information with regards to the contracts… [disclosure] would prejudice the commercial interests of the companies involved.” This suggests that the main problem is the way the role of the state has changed in recent decades, becoming little more than an enforcer of corporate priorities.

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Another important example of this process is the marketisation of healthcare. In the years before the pandemic, bed occupancy rates in health systems rose across Europe, as the number of hospital beds were slashed in the name of austerity and “efficiency”. The pandemic has exposed the short-sightedness of such a policy: in order to have enough capacity to continue the treatment of routine conditions during a health emergency, health systems require built-in “inefficiencies” of empty beds, probably of around 20%. The problem is that, in the UK in particular, the healthcare system is failing on this front. Compared to France (5.73 per 1,000 population) and Germany (7.82), the UK has a shocking low number of hospital beds (2.43). Of the top 10 countries for hospital beds per capita, only two (Germany and Austria) are not in Asia or Eastern Europe.

This might just be one measurement, but it strongly indicates that Western market dogmas around efficiency shouldn’t be taken at face value. Rather than doing away with the state, the past three years have shown that we actually need more of it. But we also need to increase democratic control and oversight over its institutions, while at the same time placing clear limits to what can be done in the name of public health. This is the only way to restore the public faith’s in public health — and, hopefully, avoid a repeat of the Covid disaster if and when the next pandemic strikes.

Considering the endless ways in which the pandemic and our response to it have changed the lives of every human being on the planet, it’s astonishing to consider how little is actually known about the origins of the virus. Two and half years on, we are still very much in the dark as to when, how and even where SARS-CoV-2 first made its appearance.

This isn’t because our efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery have proved fruitless, but rather because those efforts have been systematically thwarted by the world’s two most powerful governments: America and China. This is the mother of all Covid conspiracy theories — but it’s also true.

One of the main “conspiracy theorists” is none other than Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and chair of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission. He is not your typical tinfoil-hat-wearing internet crank. Sachs recently co-authored a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calling for an independent inquiry into the virus’s origins. He believes there is clear proof that the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the primary US public health agency, and many members of the scientific community have been impeding a serious investigation into the origins of Covid-19 in order to cover up evidence that US-funded research in Wuhan may have played a role in the creation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Many are convinced that the debate is settled, largely because almost immediately a public narrative surrounding the origin of the virus emerged. This held that the virus was zoonotic in nature, meaning that it had jumped from one or more animals (probably, it was argued, bats) to one or more humans, possibly through one or more unidentified animal intermediate hosts, and most likely at the Huanan Seafood Market  — even though there was no conclusive evidence of any of this.

Early in the pandemic, an alternative theory emerged, suggesting that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — known, of all things, for its research into SARS-related coronaviruses, and only eight miles from the Huanan Seafood Market — might have had something to do with an accidental outbreak. From a purely circumstantial standpoint, and considering the long history of safety breaches previously recorded at various facilities in China and throughout the world, one could have been justified for considering it, at the very least, a lead worth pursuing.

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As Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, Europe’s biggest philanthropic research funding body, notes in his bestselling book Spike: “It was odd for a spillover event, from animals to humans, to take off in people so immediately and spectacularly in a city with a biolab … which is home to an almost unrivalled collection of bat viruses” — especially with a new virus that “seemed almost designed to infect human cells”. If this were a coincidence, he adds, it would be a “huge” one.

Yet from the beginning the very notion that the virus might have a laboratory-based origin was stifled. The hot denials came not only from the Chinese authorities and the Wuhan Institute of Virology itself, but also from the WHO and leading Western scientists, institutions and media organisations. For around a year and a half, the “lab-leak” hypothesis was ridiculed and dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory and anyone who raised it deemed a crackpot — and even subject to censorship on Twitter and Facebook.

The mood seemed to shift when, beginning in mid-2021, several high-profile Western scientists, intelligence officials and politicians — including President Joe Biden — started to acknowledge the plausibility of a laboratory accident. Almost overnight, the lab-leak scenario went from being a “crackpot theory” to a credible and legitimate hypothesis. On the same day Biden announced that his administration would be investigating the origins of Covid-19, “including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident”, Facebook stated that it would “no longer remove the claim that Covid-19 is man-made or manufactured” from its apps.

More than a year later, there is simply no conclusive evidence of whether the virus is zoonotic or artificial in nature — even though the public narrative continues to be heavily skewed towards the natural origin theory. What we do know, however, is that a massive cover-up was orchestrated from the earliest days of the pandemic by leading members of the scientific establishment and the Chinese authorities.

This incredible story sheds light on several key aspects of the entire pandemic management, something that Toby Green and I go into in detail in our forthcoming book: the stifling of critical opinion, the lack of transparency by public institutions, the deeply unscientific manner in which the “scientific consensus” about many aspects of the pandemic came about, and how some of the leading actors of the pandemic tragedy — the WHO, Anthony Fauci, the NIH, leading scientific journals — were already engaging in the publication of papers which traduced the scientific method from the very first days of the pandemic.

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By Thomas Fazi

Here’s a brief recap of what we know about the cover-up — much of which we are aware of thanks to a series of Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requests. Much of the work on SARS-like CoVs performed in Wuhan was part of an active and highly collaborative US-China scientific research programme funded by the US government — primarily through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), directed by Anthony Fauci, which is part of the NIH — and coordinated by the US-based non-governmental organisation EcoHealth Alliance (EHA). The group’s research work went beyond the simple analysis of existing coronaviruses, and actually involved the engineering of “chimeric” bat coronaviruses, some of which proved to be potentially more infectious to humans — a highly risky technique known as gain-of-function.

In 2018, EcoHealth and the WIV (in collaboration with other institutions) sent a grant proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which included a plan to insert furin cleavage sites into existing bat coronaviruses — spots in the surface protein of a virus that can boost its entry into human cells. The DARPA proposal was rejected — and yet the presence of a furin cleavage site is precisely what sets SARS-CoV-2 apart from all known SARS-like coronaviruses. Did the researchers carry out the research anyway, possibly using other sources of funding? Nobel Prize-winning virologist David Baltimore stated that he considered this to be “the smoking gun for the origin of the virus”.

In light of all this, it’s hardly surprising that in the early days of the pandemic, at the highest levels of the US establishment, the question of whether the virus might have been engineered at the WIV, possibly through research part-funded by the US government, was taken very seriously. As a result of an FoIA request, we know that on February 1, 2020, Anthony Fauci convened a “totally confidential” conference call with at least a dozen high-level experts from around the world, many of whom privately admitted that there was a very high probability that the virus had been artificially engineered and had then “escaped” from the Wuhan lab.

Yet not only did the NIH fail to disclose this to the public or to Congress, but the emails released under the FoIA suggest that it took an early and active role in promoting the “zoonotic hypothesis” and the rejection of the laboratory-associated hypothesis. Indeed, within days of the February 1 call, a group of virologists, including some who were on it and had endorsed the “artificial origin” theory, prepared the first draft of a hugely influential paper on The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 — subsequently published in Nature — that argued for the exact opposite.

Moreover, the NIH has resisted the release of important evidence, such as the grant proposals and project reports of EHA, and has continued to redact materials released under FoIA, including a remarkable 290-page redaction in a recent release. Even more incredibly, at some point after March 2020 a number of early SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences were deleted from the NIH’s own archive at the request of researchers in Wuhan.

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The strangeness doesn’t end here. In February 2020, an influential letter signed by 27 global experts was published in The Lancet, strongly condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. The letter proved crucial, alongside the aforementioned Nature paper, in nipping in the bud the lab-leak hypothesis and giving the illusion of scientific consensus. In late 2020, however, emails released following a FoIA request showed that the Lancet statement had been orchestrated by one of the 27 co-authors — none other than Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance. It was also revealed that all but one of the other 26 scientists were linked to the Wuhan lab, their colleagues or funders.

Daszak was first appointed in late 2020 as chair of the task force created by the Lancet Covid-19 Commission with the aim of establishing none other than “the origins of Covid-19”; and shortly thereafter as the only US representative to a WHO fact-finding mission to China tasked with the same goal. Unsurprisingly, both task forces found that the virus was most likely zoonotic (i.e., natural) in origin, and that transmission through a laboratory incident was extremely unlikely.

The WHO report, in particular, came under heavy criticism, leading to the establishment of a specific work group tasked with ascertaining the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the Scientific Advisory Group on the Origins of Novel Pathogens, which published its first preliminary report in June 2022. The results were inconclusive, largely because “key pieces of data” from China were missing, leading the WHO to recommend in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe was required into whether a lab accident may be to blame. As we have seen, however, it’s not only the Chinese government that is covering up its tracks about its possible involvement in the engineering of SARS-CoV-2 — but the American one as well.

A new campaign is now underway to put the lab-leak theory to rest once and for all. The recent publication of two new studies providing more evidence that SARS-CoV-2 emerged into humans via the live animal trade at the Huanan Seafood Market has led several outlets to emphatically claim that “the Covid lab leak theory is dead”, once again misleading citizens into thinking that the debate is now really settled.

But the studies don’t provide any evidence that the virus didn’t escape from the Wuhan lab — they simply argue that it’s not a plausible scenario, also based on the fact that there’s no evidence that the virus was present at the WIV before the pandemic started. But of course absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. As Sachs notes, “this [claim] is only as good as the limited data on which it is based, and verification of this claim is dependent on gaining access to any other unpublished viral sequences that are deposited in relevant US and Chinese databases”.

Ultimately, the virus may indeed be conclusively proven to be natural in origin. But in order to do that, as Sachs stresses, a real independent scientific investigation is needed. The public deserves to be shown incontrovertible proof that the Wuhan lab has nothing to do with all this — but that means that the US and Chinese governments have to open up their lab records instead of going out of their way to prevent a real investigation. Amid a time of heightened geopolitical tensions and crumbling faith in political leadership across the West, transparency is needed more than ever. If we can’t get this one right, how else can we be expected to place our faith in authorities ever again?

The reality is that both narratives fundamentally misunderstand the position Fauci occupies in American government. Far from being a public health expert, Fauci sits at the very top of America’s biodefence infrastructure. And contrary to the notion that he is a Deep State string-puller of the Democratic party, it was George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who not only put Fauci there but created the very framework that the immunologist-physician commands.

This in part accounts for the otherwise inexplicable fact that Fauci, loathed by President Trump, was never fired by the notoriously vengeful politician who galvanised his brand with the phrase “You’re fired!”. But Fauci’s untouchability raises an even more perplexing question: Why did the media beatify him as the country’s beneficent, infallible Covid saviour rather than look into the reality of his position and the source of his nearly limitless authority?

To understand the rise of Fauci, and his legacy as he retires this year, we must return to the first months of the 2000s, when a hawkish new administration was settling into power. While George W. Bush had come to Washington touting a new brand of “compassionate conservatism”, Cheney came carrying decades of Defense Department experience, including a term as Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush during Operation Desert Storm.

Bush’s interest in biodefence and pandemic preparedness is frequently traced back to a 2004 book, The Great Influenza. The reality, however, is that the administration came to power with biological weapons and infectious disease very much top of mind, with Cheney seeking to address the gaping hole in America’s national security left by the country’s lack of a coherent biodefence strategy.

But if biodefence wasn’t already a priority for the Bush White House, that swiftly changed a week to the day after the 9/11 attacks, a mere eight months into Bush’s first term, when the United States suffered the most serious biological weapons attack in its history. On September 18, 2001, a number of national media outlets, including CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, the New York Post and the National Enquirer, received a series of letters containing a dry white powder. Three weeks later, a second round of letters was sent to the offices of senators Tom Daschle, then the Senate Majority leader, and Patrick Leahy, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Twenty-two people were infected with anthrax, five of whom died. Already in a state of unprecedented military alert, the United States was sent into near-chaos by the anthrax attacks, which, by essentially weaponising the postal system with one of the world’s most lethal pathogens, engendered a sense that the country was under attack by an unseen enemy with unfathomable capabilities.

Bush has been rightly credited with identifying the threat of a global pandemic, as well as providing a serious policy for dealing with the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa. But it was Cheney who served as the political engine behind a paradigm shift that would soon take place in America’s biodefence strategy. Six days before the 9/11 attacks, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee convened a hearing on “The Threat of Bioterrorism and the Spread of Infectious Diseases”. The hearing was led by Joe Biden, then chair of the committee, and included testimony by experts in strategic defence. In a prepared statement, Bill Frist, a physician who served as a Republican senator until 2007, noted that: “Any threat to the security of the United States from a weapon of mass destruction, even those with low probability of occurrence but high potential consequence, including biological weapons, must be taken seriously through adequate preparation.”

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The administration’s first landmark achievement in this effort was the creation of a presidential directive called “Biodefense for the 21st Century“. Signed by Bush in April 2004, it advanced a “comprehensive framework for [America’s] biodefence” based on the assumption that a bioweapons attack could devastate America. Despite being premised on a different intent (an attack), the framework described a scenario chillingly similar to what the world experienced with Covid-19, warning that a bioweapons attack could result in “catastrophic numbers of casualties, long-term disease and disability, psychological trauma, and mass panic; disrupt critical sectors of the economy and the day-to-day lives of Americans; and create cascading international effects by disrupting and damaging international trade relationships, potentially globalising the impacts of an attack on United States soil”.

That the directive warned about a biological catastrophe resulting from an attack, rather than an unintentional outbreak, was a seemingly natural assumption in the aftermath of 9/11. But even in June 2001, a small number of senior policymakers spent two days running a simulation of a bioweapons attack. Called Dark Winter, it was designed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies and was based on a putative smallpox attack. Intended less to bolster preparedness than to expose vulnerabilities, the operation showed how quickly a public health disaster could lead to widespread chaos and social collapse. This was the stuff nightmares are made of — and, by all accounts, those were the nightmares that Dick Cheney was having.

Significant as it was, his transformation of America’s biodefence framework was part of a much larger repositioning of long-term geopolitical strategy, an effort also led by Cheney. In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in the early Nineties, Cheney, then Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, along with Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, began formulating a grand strategy for the post-Cold War era. This plan, revealed in an infamous leaked memo, was rooted in a single strategic objective: America should permanently remain the world’s superpower. Its architects argued the US would do so only by preserving “strategic depth” to “shape the security environment”. The initial leaked memo was later reworked by Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, who broadened the concept of “strategic depth” to cover not only geographic reach but also an ability to wage war with weapons that could not only cripple an enemy’s military capabilities but disrupt its political, economic and social stability.

In this context, the Bush Administration began ramping up biodefence spending, which quintupled to $317 million in 2002 alone. But that same year, an unusual respiratory disease started to spread in the Guangdong region of China. Eventually classified as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, the disease would claim the lives of some 800 people as it spread across Asia, Europe, North America, the Mideast, reaching as far as New Zealand.

Although SARS was contained by the summer of 2003, that year the world witnessed the outbreak of yet another respiratory disease. In this case, it was the re-emergence of an avian influenza in the form of a strain known as H5N1, which had long been identified as having pandemic potential. The virus was found to have a terrifying 60% mortality rate.

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By 2003, the Bush administration was requesting $2 billion in annual budget for biodefence — a sum that, as the Los Angeles Times noted, exceeded the combined research budgets for breast cancer, lung cancer, stroke and tuberculosis. That year, Bush announced in his State of the Union address that he would propose a further $6 billion for the development and stockpiling of vaccines over the subsequent decade, in addition to baseline biodefence funding.

The money was essential, but transforming a core element of America’s national strategic defence was as much about restructuring the governmental and human aspects of biodefence as it was funding them. In the case of research-based bioweapons preparedness, Cheney’s masterstroke was to remove the fragmented biodefence research programmes from various departments, institutes and centres, and place them under the aegis of a single institute: the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), led then, as now, by Anthony Fauci.

A 2003 NIAID article detailed what this shift meant for the relatively obscure public health agency: “In 2003, NIAID was assigned lead responsibility… for civilian biodefence research with a focus on research and early development of medical countermeasures against terrorist threats from infections diseases and radiation exposures. NIAID later assumed responsibility for coordinating the NIH-wide effort to develop medical countermeasures against threats to the civilian population.” While the statement is laden with references to “civilian research”, it included a crucial caveat that explains much about its role right through the Covid-19 pandemic: “Because new potentially deadly pathogens, such as avian influenza, may be naturally occurring as well as deliberately introduced by terrorists, NIAID’s biodefence research is integrated into its larger emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases portfolio.”

In other words, as far as NIAID was concerned, there was no meaningful administrative distinction between biodefence and scientific research. With the stroke of Cheney’s pen, all United States biodefence efforts, classified or unclassified, were placed under the aegis of Anthony Fauci. So important was this new command structure that a representative from the office of Scooter Libby, Cheney’s powerful chief of staff, was physically placed in NIAID headquarters in Washington during the transition to function as “a kind of political commissar” from the vice president’s office. This gave Fauci unparalleled access to not just Cheney, but President Bush, to whom he had an open channel.

Fauci now had a virtual carte blanche to not merely approve but design and run the kind of research projects he sought — and could do so with no oversight structure above him. Biodefence projects that formerly would have fallen under the authority of military or intelligence agencies were now under his direct supervision.

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It’s this that explains one of the most bewildering irregularities surrounding Anthony Fauci: his compensation. As widely reported, Fauci is the highest paid member of the federal government, out-earning the President, four-star generals, senators, and Super Court Justices. His salary roughly doubled that of his own (nominal) boss, until recently, NIH director Francis Collins. Fauci’s giant pay packet can be traced back to 2004, the year after NIAID was made the country’s top biodefence authority agency. According to a report by Forbes, that year NIH deputy director Raynard S. Kingston wrote a formal memo to the agency’s director, Elias Zerhouni “to request that the current retention allowance [amount redacted] for Dr. Anthony S. Fauci be converted… in order to appropriately compensate him for the level of his responsibly in his current position of Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), especially as it relates to his work on biodefence research activities.”

This salary jump was only a by-product of the radical restructuring of America’s biodefence apparatus. The much more significant outcome was that Fauci was essentially placed at the top of a new chain of command over which he gained nearly total decision-making ability. He went from being the director of one the NIH’s constituent 27 institutes to being the only one who really mattered.

But it was Fauci’s ability to span the divide between science and politics, to “play ball”, that made him essential to the political echelon. The rapid increase in biodefence funding in the post-9/11 world, and the mushrooming of agencies and departments involved in the endeavour, would inevitably draw critics. One was, and still is, Richard Ebright, a major figure in the world of epidemiology who serves as chair of the Board of Governors and is a Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University.

“This well-intentioned response may perversely have exactly the opposite effect,” Ebright told the Los Angeles Times in 2003, implying that the burgeoning field of biodefence research could lead to leaks, failures, and even a bioweapons arms race. But, by then, the Bush administration had hired a man credible enough to respond to, and, in many ways, outshine the critics. “It’s going to be a challenge,” Fauci told the Times, dismissing Ebright’s concern as “spurious”. “But I have every confidence that the biomedical research community will adapt well to the change.”

Almost two decades later, as he heads towards retirement, his confidence seems misplaced. Perhaps in this we have another crucial lesson from the pandemic: that Marvel-like heroes, with all their fabulous abilities, are no replacement for the facts.

Known as the Global Virome Project, the scheme was officially launched in February 2018. By 2019, it had appointed a board of directors and made the “transition to a legal and operational reality”, according to an email from its head. Yet when a pandemic did break out at the end of that year, instead of leaping into action the Global Virome Project fell silent. It made no announcements, issued no press releases, arranged no public events.

Today, its website is an online zombie. In the greatest pandemic in a century, caused by exactly the sort of novel emerging virus it was designed to predict and prevent, it lists just three publications on its website, one of which is a dead link and the others four and six-years-old. Its “in the news” page lists no article after April 2021. What happened?

Using embassy cables, emails released under freedom of information, and government reports, we have pieced together the history of this wide-ranging international collaborative project and how it vanished just when it was most needed.

The seeds of the project were sown between 2009 and 2019, when the US government funded a big push into virus hunting in wildlife in tropical regions through a programme called PREDICT. When this funding came to an end, the main players got together to seek private and charitable funding to continue the work. These included, from government, Dennis Carrol, director of the Emerging Pandemic Threats Division within the United States Agency for International Development; from academia, Jonna Mazet of the University of California at Davis, who had been director of the PREDICT project; from the non-profit world, Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance, who became treasurer of the new project; and from the private sector, Nathan Wolfe, founder of the DNA database firm Metabiota.

The first meeting of the GVP’s steering committee took place in Beijing in January 2017. George Gao, the incoming head of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was quick out of the blocks with China’s contribution to the GVP, overseeing the rapid creation of the China National Virome Project. It was formed so quickly that by August 2017 Eddy Rubin, chief scientific officer at Metabiota, wrote: “The project appears to be moving faster than expected with a China component already funded and poised to generate data”.

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However, as the GVP was preparing to launch, some scientists had misgivings: did the project even make sense? As two Australian virologists told a reporter for the Atlantic, the work was “unlikely to be informative in predicting the next pandemic”. Spotting the one virus among millions that might cause a pandemic would make finding needles in haystacks look easy. “What you’re trying to predict is likely something that happens maybe once out of tens of billions of encounters, with one virus out of millions of potential viruses. You will lose your fight against the numbers,” said Jemma Geoghan and Ed Holmes.

Other virologists shared their doubts. “Making promises about disease prevention… that cannot be kept will only further undermine trust,” wrote Dr Holmes, in a joint article with Edinburgh University’s Andrew Rambaut and the Scripps Institute’s Kristian Andersen. “I still fail to see at this point how it’s going to better prepare the human race for the next infectious disease that jumps from animals to humans,” wrote Michael Osterholm, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy.

Nonetheless, ignoring these awkward objections, the GVP team pressed ahead with the project. It was formally launched in February 2018, with an article in Science magazine, authored by Carrol, Daszak, Wolfe, Gao and Mazet with four others. China was poised to play the leading role. “Funding has been identified to support an initial administrative hub, and fieldwork is planned to begin in the first two countries, China and Thailand, during 2018,” the article declared.

In a cable from September 2017, Ping Chen, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases office in the US embassy in Beijing, had reported that the China part of the project was being funded by grants from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), China’s leading coronavirus virologist, was quoted in the cable as saying: “CAS has already allocated funding for GVP-related research”. Wang Zhengwu, of the Department of International Affairs at CAS, was further quoted as saying “CAS is working on a process and mechanism to support Chinese scientists with backing from the Ministry of Sciences and Technology and The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) for Global Virome Project type research”.

Sure enough in January 2018, Shi Zhengli received two research grants, one each from NSFC and CAS to study the risk of cross infection of humans by bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. It appears the Wuhan Institute had already been entrusted with the main work of the China National Virome Project. In April 2018, confirming the link between this work and the GVP, a US embassy cable noted that “The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli… is the forerunner to the Global Virome Project.”

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Meanwhile, in March 2018, the EcoHealth Alliance, WIV and others had submitted a joint proposal to DARPA, the Pentagon’s research funding agency. It included a section in which the researchers detailed plans to introduce a genetic sequence called a furin cleavage site into novel SARS-like viruses to increase their ability to infect cells in the laboratory and make them easier to grow. This is the very sequence that has turned up in the virus causing Covid, and in no other SARS-like coronavirus.

The proposal, titled DEFUSE, was turned down by DARPA. Shortly after, however, a “Special Project” was initiated by the CAS with Shi Zhengli in charge for one of the subprojects. The scope largely corresponds and overlaps with the GVP and Project DEFUSE. The goal was to “change the passive response situation of emerging infectious diseases to active monitoring and early warning”, “explore and identify pathogens with potential risks of infecting humans, studying their ability to invade different host cells and their replication ability in different host cells”, and “analyse the key molecules affecting its cross-species infection and its pathogenic mechanism”. In November 2018, at a conference in Bangkok, Hongying Li, the coordinator for the China National Virome Project, showed a slide of the “GVP viral database model”. It included “virus isolation”, the technical term for growing live viruses in the lab.

Some have therefore speculated that the unfunded DEFUSE project could have continued with funding from the CAS. In a recent Vanity Fair article, the prominent Pasteur Institute virologist Simon Wain-Hobson was quoted as saying that “it is possible the WIV would have wanted to copy what it viewed as cutting-edge science”.

The output of the GVP was intended to be a global database of all viruses collected, available to the world. “I believe that our Chinese side can make our great contributions for the development of GVP database system and data portal by the support from China CDC and CAS,” George Gao noted in an email. But there was unease in the West about this. As a State Department cable put it: “Who will own the samples that are collected from many countries? Where will they be analysed? Will all the GVP data be freely available to the public?” Another US embassy cable noted: “Other countries… are skeptical on whether China could remain transparent as a “gatekeeper” for this information.” Eddy Rubin was more blunt: “There is a concern about data sharing if only China takes the lead.”

They were right to be concerned. By 17 July 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had built one of the world’s largest databases of bat and rodent viruses, holding more than 22,000 samples and data entries of pathogens. It has repeatedly refused to share this data with international scientists since the pandemic began. Some of those viruses were collected with funding from US taxpayer dollars, and some samples were collected from countries neighbouring China, such as Laos.

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On 12 September 2019, this database was suddenly taken offline. The Institute has not published any details of the SARS-like viruses they were studying after 2016, claiming that people were trying to hack the database. This, of course, makes no sense: sharing data, as intended, makes hacking unnecessary.

Yet far from drawing back because of the data-sharing concerns, in November 2018, Dr Ping Chen of the US Embassy in Beijing sent an email to the National Institutes of Health in the United States detailing proposals for America to share the cost of China’s virus hunting projects. In the version obtained by Judicial Watch under Freedom of Information, most of the email has been redacted, as has most of an attached presentation from July 2019 by the Ecohealth Alliance entitled “Working Towards a China-led Virome project”. What is in these documents, prepared about a year before the pandemic broke out in the city with the most active contribution to the GVP, and caused by a virus of the kind being most actively studied by that project? It would be nice to know.

In a March 2019 article in the journal Biosafety and Health, Dr Gao drew attention to the extra risk of causing a pandemic by studying viruses in the laboratory: “genetic modification of pathogens, which may expand host range as well as increase transmission and virulence, may result in new risks for epidemics.” This was exactly what the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing to the viruses it was collecting in the wild: working with full-length infectious clones, manipulating their spike genes, creating “chimera” hybrids and testing their infectiousness in human cells and humanised mice.

In August 2019, Dr Gao spoke at length on a podcast, saying that part of the GVP would involve altering viruses in the lab: “[In] GVP you might isolate some virus, you look at it and there is nothing to do with humans, however through adaptation, evolution, you might have some virus adapt to human beings, so as basic scientists you will do all these either in a lab or do the surveillance.”

For some reason, professional journalists have shown little appetite for investigating the GVP since the pandemic began, arguing that it was still just an idea, not yet in operation, which is true outside China. In a recent exchange on Twitter, for instance, Jon Cohen of Science magazine suggested that the GVP had not started as a data-collecting network before the pandemic hit. The independent data analyst Gilles Demaneuf responded that China forging ahead without an agreement about data sharing was a red flag that should call the existence of the GVP into question.

As for the China National Virome Project, almost nothing has been heard of it in the past two years, as if it never existed. The Global Virome Project has also largely evaporated. Both were designed to predict and prevent the next pandemic, a task at which plainly they failed: the research was a year and a half in the making and provided no benefit when the Covid pandemic began. That this work might instead have caused the pandemic is a possibility that must be investigated.

That was Wodehouse in 1941, from one of his Berlin broadcasts. But pretty much the same has applied 80 years later in Hong Kong, just with fewer Germans. If your goal has ever been to get locked in a room for weeks on end, then Hong Kong has become the place to be. The authorities would lock you up if you had Covid. They’d lock you up if you’d been close to someone who had Covid. At one point, they’d even lock you up if you’d been close to someone who’d been close to someone who had Covid.

You also got locked up just for getting into the country. You paid for the flight and the Hong Kong authorities would do the rest. Actually, that last bit wasn’t quite true: you had to book and pay for your room as well. But you get the point.

Brutal as it was — caring little for minor things like family separation or childcare — this system worked relatively well by its own standards until earlier this year. For extended periods there were no Covid cases at all and overall deaths remained low. But then Omicron broke through, as almost everyone knew it would: ironically, as the result of a cross-infection in a quarantine hotel, something the government had been warned about repeatedly.

There soon became too many cases to make asymptomatic people spend weeks in hospital and there were not enough isolation units to lock up close contacts. By the start of March, the death rate went through the roof, becoming the highest in the world at any point in the pandemic. They couldn’t process the dead quickly enough, with bodies stacked next to the living, in overrun, under-staffed, public hospitals. Hong Kong ran out of coffins as well as smugness. It became the premier place to be if you wanted to die from Covid.

The tragedy was how avoidable all this was. Having broadly succeeded in the initial stages of the pandemic, cutting down local case numbers down zero for months, Hong Kong had an opportunity — almost unique in the world — to transition, with as few deaths as possible, to a sustainable mitigation strategy.

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Hong Kong's Zero Covid deception

By Philip Cowley

Its failure not to take that opportunity has now been widely noted — as has its recent announcement that it would begin to relax some of its stricter restrictions. From outside, this has been presented as a pragmatic shift away from its policy of “dynamic zero Covid” to something akin to co-existence. The idea of “living with Covid” was previously verboten here, a sign of Western decadence and a failure to care about the value of human life, so any such shift would be profound.

Yet from within Hong Kong the shift seems less significant and reaction to the policy changes here have been more muted than some of the overseas coverage might suggest.

This is partly because the details are less dramatic than the headlines. Schools were told they could go back to face-to-face teaching, only for the government to then announce that they need to have achieved a 90% vaccination rate among staff and students before they could return to full days, something many will find next to impossible to achieve in what remains of the school year. Some of the more extreme rules remain: mask wearing is compulsory outside, even if exercising, even in remote country parks. There are still stories of the police lurking behind bushes to catch out knackered joggers who have pulled down their masks to catch their breath.

While the outright country flight bans that previously existed are to be dropped from April, and quarantine has been reduced to seven days (until recently it was 21), it’s still seven days more than most of the world insists on and it is also open only to vaccinated residents — no visitors at all. At any point, if an airline is found to have brought too many positive cases into Hong Kong, they are banned from that route for seven days. Travellers then have to rearrange everything, including the quarantine hotel, which is often simply not possible given the demand, and means not getting into Hong Kong for months. All of this remains a serious problem for Asia’s self-proclaimed “world city”.

But my suspicion is that the real reason people here are less impressed goes beyond the details of the changes; it is now a broader issue about lack of faith in the government, and the absence of any strategy.

For some, this is inextricably linked to the protests in 2019 and the government’s heavy-handed response — something for which a fair few people have been locked up, and for longer than three weeks. A significant proportion of Hongkongers wouldn’t trust the government whatever they did. But even if you are one of those who thinks that the Hong Kong government was right in its approach, it is difficult to say that it has recently demonstrated competence. It is not just the failures to prepare properly for the current outbreak — although that alone should have been enough to have ended multiple political careers. There have also been constant U-turns on policy.

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Perhaps the worst recently was the announcement that all the school term dates were to change, bringing forward the summer holiday to Easter — I am not making this up — to allow school buildings to be used for a city-wide testing programme. Then it was floated that this might also simultaneously involve a lockdown, which triggered panic-shopping; only for the government to then decide that maybe they didn’t want to do any of it after all.

Given the U-turns so far it would be a brave person who would bet against another massive reversal of policy months down the line. What happens when case numbers start to rise again? Or there are the inevitable outbreaks in schools?

One common response to this is to say something like: “Of course, they can’t say they are going to live with the virus. That would involve too much loss of face. But that’s obviously what they are doing”.

But there are two problems with this argument. The first is that there is plenty of evidence that this is not what they are doing: at the same time as there is talk of reopening the schools and the borders, the government has also been building multiple new isolation centres. Mass testing may have been put on hold, but compulsory testing of people who have been in places with Covid cases has restarted. As case numbers have fallen to more manageable levels, so people have begun to get put back into isolation. None of this looks like living with the virus.

Second, even if this were true, it is never a good sign for any government to say it is doing one thing while doing another. Even if the people at the top of government think they are following a plan, it makes it less likely for there to be a proper alignment of strategy and implementation. Chief Executive Carrie Lam has said that Hong Kong’s struggle with Covid is akin to a war, so it’s worth considering what Clausewitz said about military strategy. It was “to identify the decisive point and to concentrate everything on it, removing forces from secondary fronts and ignoring lesser objectives”. We shouldn’t necessarily have expected the Hong Kong authorities to have read Clausewitz — but at times they act as if they have read him only so they can work out how to do the exact opposite. There is no identification of the decisive point, no concentration of resources, and there’s always a host of lesser objectives.

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In the same way that the massive focus on locking people up and keeping out those from overseas distracted what should have been the main priority of vaccinating people in care homes, only last week Lam argued that Hong Kong needed both to reopen the mainland border and to open up to international travel. Yet these are in direct tension. As long as the policy on the mainland is for Zero Covid, the mainland border won’t open up while there are outbreaks in Hong Kong — but if you allow international travel without quarantine, you will get outbreaks. “To govern,” as Pierre Mendès-France put it, “is to choose.”  Hong Kong’s administration cannot choose, and thus it cannot govern.

One of the curiosities about Hong Kong — at least to a polling junkie like me — is the almost complete lack of decent opinion polling here. When asking awkward questions can get you threatened with the National Security Law, it is difficult to ask tricky questions or expect honest answers, and to know what people really think.

But for many the tipping point has been reached and people are voting with their feet. A full 1% of the population left last month. Some may be coming back, but lots are not. And sure, in time, when all this is a distant memory, others will come in to replace them, but the immediate consequences are significant. Talent drains, organisations relocate, businesses fold. The infrastructure won’t return, the diversity is lost. It is said that the recent promised policy shifts came in response to pleas from the city’s great and good, worried that irreversible damage was being done to Hong Kong’s status as a financial centre. These pleas were too quiet, and, for many, too late.

And now that Omicron has arrived at its shores, the bastion of Zero Covid is recording daily cases in the thousands. Even New Zealand’s government admits it is time for a new strategy. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has ruled out further lockdowns. And earlier this month, Chris Hipkins, the minister responsible for the pandemic response, admitted that “everybody would agree [they are] not feasible”. Indeed, the large case numbers in recent days have not brought the sort of anxiety and panic that previous, much smaller, outbreaks did.

Undoubtedly, this shift has been a long time coming, presaged by many false starts. The international border remains closed, for instance, despite an initial plan to allow the gradual return of citizens from 17 January. The government promised that his reopening was “locked in”, but it was suspended in late December, sparking dismay and anguish from stranded citizens unable to get one of the very few places in the country’s quarantine hotels.

The government was unrepentant, however, proceeding to suspend the allocation of new quarantine places for a month, claiming the system was struggling with Omicron. Its cruel and arbitrary nature was highlighted by the story of a pregnant Al Jazeera journalist, Charlotte Bellis, who was denied an emergency place to return home to give birth, forcing her to turn to the Taliban for protection. After international outcry, a place did mysteriously materialise, but the government continues to defend the system as having “served us well”.

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Will New Zealand ever escape Zero Covid?

By Tom Chodor

The original re-opening plan will now begin at the end of the month: citizens living in Australia will be able to return from 27 February, if they quarantine at home. There will then be a slow and gradual reopening to citizens from elsewhere, as well as international students and visa holders. Even then, it’s a case of two steps forward, one step back, with “Fortress New Zealand” not due to fully open to the rest of the world until October 2022.

Nevertheless, the government and its supporters defend such caution, arguing that over the past two years it has enabled the New Zealand to buy time to prepare for the pandemic, and learn from countries’ experiences. But is New Zealand making the most of its late mover advantage?

On the one hand, there are positive signs. Observing the benefit of boosters against Omicron, the government acted swiftly, slashing the waiting period between doses, and ramping up its roll out. As a result, 2 million people — out of a total population of 5 million — are now boosted. New Zealand also took notice of the “pingdemic” in the UK in 2021 — and the food shortages, closed businesses and supply chain chaos in Australia, when Omicron forced the isolation of essential workers — and planned accordingly. Under “phase 2” of its Omicron Response Strategy, the isolation period for positive cases has been shortened and the definition of a close contact relaxed. Essential workers with a positive case in their household will be allowed to continue working if they return a negative test.

This certainly contrasts positively with the bungled policymaking in Australia over the summer, where federal and state governments made up new rules and requirements on the hoof; Prime Minister Scott Morrison actually suggested enlisting minors to drive forklifts to ease the supply chain shortages. Instead, the New Zealand government confidently predicts “we’re ready”.

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And yet, two years into the pandemic, the health system remains perpetually “stretched to its limits”, with warnings that Omicron will tip it over the edge. New Zealand remains near the bottom of global rankings when it comes to ICU beds per capita, more than 50% below the OECD average, and below countries like India. In December, funding was finally allocated to increase that number, but the new beds won’t be ready until June. Experts predict the country is about 90 beds short of what is required. There is also a shortage of critical care nurses to serve them, and dire warnings of the dangers of delayed care for cardiac and surgery patients. Ironically, this situation is made worse by closed borders, and the lack of priority given to nurses waiting in the immigration queue.

Meanwhile, for all the forward planning, the government has dropped the ball on the most important element: testing. Rapid antigen tests (RATs) remain scarce in New Zealand; the government failed to secure enough ahead of the Omicron wave. Like Australia, it only seems to have caught on to the importance of RATs once Omicron was raging around the world, by which time the global market for them was tight. Most of its rushed orders since are not due to arrive for weeks, and there are currently only 7 million RATs in the country, with more arriving by the end of the month. This has led to rationing, with RATs restricted to essential workers through a convoluted bureaucratic system. There are examples of the government confiscating tests ordered by private businesses, sparking ugly public recriminations.

Lacking RATs, New Zealand continues relying on the PCR testing system, which is struggling to deal with exploding cases, leading to long wait times for results. Consequently, businesses in Queenstown are already closing and reducing trading hours due to staff shortages.

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In short, despite talk of lessons learned and readiness, it looks like New Zealand may end up repeating many of the mistakes made by other countries. And there will be consequences for the Ardern government, which has a lot riding on the next few months. For the past two years, the Labour government has remained wildly popular due to its pandemic response, even if that popularity took a hit during the Delta lockdowns last year. But this year, the nation having finally reached the Covid crossroads, the government’s handling of the pandemic has increasingly come into question.

Polling shows 44.3% of the population believe the government hasn’t prepared well enough for the Omicron outbreak, and the net number of those who feel the country is heading in the right direction has decreased from 15% in January to 1% this month. And the opposition National Party — under a new leader, former businessman Christopher Luxton — has been zeroing in on the government’s shortcomings, and is being rewarded for it in the polls.

Meanwhile, a “Freedom Convoy” made its way across the country, arriving in the capital last week and blockading the streets outside Parliament. One of many demonstrations inspired by the Ottawa truckers, it demands an end to vaccine mandates and Covid restrictions. New Zealand requires workers in a wide array of industries to be vaccinated, including in health, education and police and emergency services, as well as — crucially — workers in ‘close-proximity’ businesses that require a vaccination pass for customers to attend, such as hospitality, events and gyms. Estimates suggest that this could include up to 70% of the total workforce, with bosses having the power to sack workers if they refuse to get vaccinated.

In this context, the protesters insist they will continue their occupation until the mandate is removed, and restrictions eased. They include a very diverse range of people, often with wildly contrasting politics. What unites them is their growing marginalisation from everyday life as vaccine mandates create a two-tier society.

Unsurprisingly, the response from the government — and the wider political class — has been one of disdain. Politicians from the main parties refuse to meet with the protesters, labelling them violent and anti-social, and dismissing any discussion of their demands. (While there have been instances of abusive and violent behaviour, for the most part the protests have been peaceful.)

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By Tom Chodor

The parliamentary authorities have resorted to underhand tactics to disperse them, turning on sprinklers, and blasting loud music — strategically, the greatest hits of Barry Manilow — to wear them down. With ridicule failing to do the trick, the government is turning to repression: police have attempted to clear the camp and arrested more than 120 people. Even the army was called in to remove the protesters’ vehicles. Yet the protestors remain.

While local residents have little time for the protests, a recent poll found that 30% of the population support them — which creates another dilemma for the government. Having already dismissed them as beyond the pale, it is unlikely to backtrack. But a violent crackdown to remove them will further marginalise a large portion of the electorate.

In short, New Zealand’s once oh-so-cohesive Covid policy is falling apart. And as disenchantment grows, its government could soon find itself overwhelmed by a crisis of a very different order.

I am an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, as well as a practising physician, and I firmly believe that it would be a mistake to censor Rogan under the guise of combating “misinformation”.

Rogan is not a scientist, and, like everyone else, he has his biases. But he is open-minded, sceptical, and his podcast is an important forum for debate and dialogue. It is not enough, moreover, to simply dismiss Malone and McCullough as conspiracy theorists. They are controversial and polarising figures, but they do have real credentials. Malone is a physician who has worked in molecular biology and drug development for decades, while McCullough was, until recently, an academic cardiologist and researcher.

Both speakers made accurate and useful points on Rogan’s podcast — as well as unsupported, speculative, alarmist, and false ones. The correct way to deal with incorrect ideas in biomedicine, if they rise to a level of prominence that warrants rebuttal, is to rebut them.

In what follows, I attempt to assess their main claims, explaining what they get right and what they get wrong. I cannot address every point that the two of them made — both episodes are close to three hours long — but I hope that I can provide some clarity in a debate that often lacks it.

Claim: The risks of mRNA vaccination are underdiscussed and boosters should be debated

Early in his interview, Malone is critical of the scientific and media discussion of vaccine safety, noting that “no discussion of risk is allowed”. Later, he says that the pejorative label of “anti-vaxxer” is used to stifle legitimate debate over vaccines. Malone and McCullough both warn that mRNA vaccines, such as Pfizer and Moderna, can cause myocarditis, especially in young men who are at low risk from the virus. Given these and other alleged risks, they warn against recommending — or requiring — boosters for the general population.

I believe they are correct in these sentiments. In April 2021, the first reports of myocarditis were noted in Israel, with the majority of cases occurring in young men who had recently received an mRNA vaccine. Since then, the evidence for vaccine-related myocarditis has grown. We know now that boys are more likely to be affected than girls. We know that Moderna has higher rates than Pfizer. We know that dose two causes more myocarditis than dose one. The precise estimate of risk is now thought to be between 1 in 3,000 to 6,000 for males in the target range (roughly age 12 to 30), and researchers have shown that the CDC’s method to study this underestimates myocarditis risk.

Such concerns are not limited to the fringe. Marion Gruber and Phil Krause, the former director and deputy director, respectively, at the US Food and Drug Administration, resigned last autumn over White House pressure to green-light boosters. Paul Offit, a prominent vaccine advocate and the director of vaccine communication at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, recently told the Atlantic that he advised his own 20-something son not to get boosted. Other nations are taking the myocarditis concern seriously, too. Several have banned or discouraged the use of Moderna in young men. Others advise two doses spaced further apart, and some have held off on a second dose entirely for younger age groups.

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It is perfectly valid to question the wisdom of boosters, at least in young people, though I do think they are beneficial for older and more vulnerable people. Like Malone, I have seen researchers smeared as “anti-vaxxers” for simply suggesting that myocarditis is a real safety concern, or that we don’t know the optimal duration and dosing strategy of vaccination, particularly for young and healthy people and those who have recovered from infection. Malone and Rogan are correct that the media dismisses concerns over myocarditis by claiming that most cases are “mild”, when in fact it is too early for us to know the full effects.  And I agree that this is an area of live debate that has not been adequately covered by the media.

Claim: Vaccines have lots of other dangerous side effects

At other points in his interview, Malone alludes to many potential side effects of vaccination, claiming it can result in seizure and paralysis, and that the menstrual irregularities associated with the vaccine suggest it is a “major threat to reproductive health” for women. He suggests that vaccination can suppress T cells, raising the risk of unusual cancers.

To date, I have seen no evidence to support any of these claims, and I believe it is a mistake to raise them. First, they are irresponsible — Malone’s rhetoric verges on fear-mongering — and second, they distract from his legitimate points on myocarditis in young men.

McCullough suggests that vaccine-related deaths and injuries in the US are severely underreported by the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). While I agree that there are problems with VAERS, I find it difficult to believe the numbers McCullough offers of 45,000 dead and 1 million injured. Here is why.

VAERS is a voluntary collection network that is prone to two types of biases. First, it may undercount vaccine-related events because providers did not recognise them or lacked motivation to report them. But it can also overcount them. Bad things can happen after vaccination, such as heart attack, that are entirely coincidental but that still might be reported.

Trying to find safety signals due to vaccination requires comparison against base rates, or how many events are expected to occur without vaccination. Even very unusual events, such as the blood clots that happened after the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, stand out fast. Similarly, elevated myocarditis rates in young men, especially after dose two of Moderna, jump out of the data.

Death signals are trickier to parse, and require knowledge of the ages and medical problems of people getting vaccinated. Even then, they must be weighed against data that shows vaccines reduce a big cause of death — death from Covid-19. For these reasons, I think it is premature and misleading to talk suggest that the vaccine caused 45,000 deaths. If McCullough wishes to make this case, the best forum would a scholarly publication, where other researchers can examine and critique his methodology.

Claim: US vaccine policy ignores the science on natural immunity

Malone and McCullough both make valid points that vaccine policy has not accommodated scientific knowledge of natural immunity. Should vaccines be required for people who have already been infected with Covid? If a healthy young person had one dose of the vaccine and then got Omicron, do they need a second? What if a person had two doses and Omicron — should they need to receive a booster, as some workplaces now require? These are open and legitimate questions.

Proponents of vaccines and boosters for those with a prior Covid-19 infection often point to antibody titers — blood tests showing that a recently vaccinated or boosted person has higher levels of Covid-19 antibodies than someone with natural immunity. But this is not persuasive.

Antibodies are a means to a clinical end, which is preventing someone from getting re-infected, becoming very sick, becoming hospitalised, or dying. Antibodies, especially in the short term, are bound to be higher the more you dose an individual, but the scientific burden is to show that these doses further improve the clinical endpoint in randomised studies. This burden has not yet been met.

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Yet, here too, Malone goes over the top. He and Rogan refer to “multiple studies” showing that those who get vaccinated after being infected with Covid are at a two-to four-times greater risk of having an adverse reaction to the vaccine; later, Malone describes Rogan’s friends who are encouraging him to get vaccinated as asking Rogan to put himself “at higher risk” and “take more risk for your health in order to join their club”. There is a dialogue to be had about whether Rogan might benefit from zero, one, or two doses, but the overall risks of vaccination remain low, particularly for a 54-year-old man such as Rogan.

At times, Malone refers to accurate studies, but I worry the audience draws the wrong inference. Malone, for instance, claims that natural immunity is six to 13 times more effective than the vaccine at preventing hospitalisation and 27 times more effective against developing symptomatic disease. I assume he is referring to this August 2021 study from Israel. This study does indeed suggest that natural immunity is more protective than vaccines against the Delta variant, though it also suggests that natural immunity plus a single vaccine dose is more protective than natural immunity alone.

While this has implications for the number of doses a Covid-19 survivor might consider getting, it should not be misconstrued to mean that infection is preferable to vaccination for an adult who has yet to experience either. Vaccination is almost surely preferable for most un-immune adults.

At one point in his interview, Malone says: “Think twice about giving these jabs to your kids.” While I can understand how many will be angered by this statement, the truth is other nations, such as the United Kingdom, are thinking twice — at least for healthy 5 to 11-year-olds, the group with the lowest risk of bad outcomes from Covid. As of this moment, the UK’s advisory panel has said that only 5 to 11-year-olds with comorbidities should get vaccinated.

Claim: Effective early treatments, including hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, are being suppressed

McCullough and Malone are proponents of early treatment for Covid-19, specifically with ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Both allege that public health authorities have intentionally suppressed the use of these drugs. McCullough states that early in the pandemic, “there was no focus on sick patients”, while Malone speculates that hospitals don’t want early treatments because they profit when people are hospitalised and claims that “probably half a million excess deaths” have happened in the United States through the intentional blockade of early treatments.

These are entirely false and insulting allegations, and Malone’s in particular are flat-out conspiratorial. Academic hospitals attempted all sorts of disparate treatment protocols in the hopes of helping sick patients. Many physicians did not wait for randomised control trials — the gold standard of medicine — to act; they simply acted. In fact, a Harvard hospital recommended hydroxychloroquine prior to randomised data.

The problem was not that there was no appetite for early treatment. The problem was that when the randomised trial data came in, they suggested the drugs favored by Malone and McCullough were ineffective. A pooled analysis of all such studies by Axfors and colleagues suggests patients treated with chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine had increased risk of death.

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And ivermectin has not shown persuasive evidence of benefit in randomised trials to date. Of course, a randomised trial cannot prove that a therapy can never work under any circumstances, just as you cannot prove that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. But the burden is on proponents to show when and how their therapy helps, and they have not met it.

Rogan, Malone and McCullough are wrong to claim that ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine are known to be secretly effective, but they are correct that these drugs have been unfairly demonised. The truth is that they are neither particularly dangerous nor effective. The media labelling ivermectin a “horse drug” or “horse dewormer” was particularly absurd. Ivermectin is a well-known drug taken by humans all over the world.

Claim: Public debate over Covid-19 is often unfairly censored

Malone, Rogan, and McCullough are all correct on one topic: there is an effort to suppress information and censor debate on social media. The clearest example is that for more than a year, Facebook banned all discussion of the lab-leak hypothesis, until articles by Nicholson Baker, Nicholas Wade, and Donald McNeil broke the dam. This was a remarkable suppression of free speech.

Previously, I investigated the mechanism by which Facebook polices pandemic “misinformation” through third-party investigators. I found, in several cases, that the expert designated to fact-check a claim had already stated their opinion on it prior to being selected. This is a deeply problematic mechanism, as the person who selects the fact-checkers can scour the Internet to an expert who agrees with them, and there is no external review, appeal or oversight.

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Malone discusses a controversial October 2020 email from National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins to Anthony Fauci in response to the Great Barrington Declaration. In it, Collins called three of the declaration’s authors “fringe” epidemiologists and demanded a “quick and devastating published take down of its premises”. I completely agree this was problematic.

As I have argued elsewhere, 2020 was a time of deep uncertainty about the science surrounding Covid-19 and the appropriate policy response to the pandemic. Collins is not an epidemiologist, and he has no standing to decide what counts as a “fringe” view within that field. As NIH director, his job is to foster dialogue among scientists and acknowledge uncertainty. Instead, he attempted to suppress legitimate debate with petty, ad hominem attacks.

***

The efforts to censor Malone and McCullough have massively backfired, with both men gaining prominence and publicity from the attempts to shut down their speech. More generally, I strongly disagree with efforts to censor scientists, even if they are incorrect, and no matter the implications of their words, as I believe the harms of censorship far exceed any short-term gains.

One problem, which has been on full display in this controversy, is that censorship may draw more attention to incorrect ideas. Another is that in the middle of any crisis, the answers to many scientific and policy questions will be uncertain. Disagreement on these questions is natural, and attempts to suffocate “harmful” speech run the risk of stifling critical debates, including by silencing third parties who may have important contributions but who fear the professional or reputational consequences of speaking up.

Perhaps the most serious objection to censorship is that the censors themselves are not fit for the task. Censors are unaccountable. They may be biased, misinformed or undereducated. They may lack perspective. In short, they are as fallible as the people they are trying censor. This is especially true in science, where, as history shows us, consensus views can turn out to be false, while controversial or heretical ideas can be vindicated.

Finally, in the modern world, where the censor is so often a giant technology company, there is tremendous potential for abuse. The same tools used to suppress scientific “misinformation” may someday be used to solidify political power and stifle dissent.

Today, little has changed. The NHS’s looming vaccine mandate — requiring that employees are vaccinated against Covid before April — has inspired grim warnings about the debilitating impact of an exodus of staff: the effect on waiting times, on overworked doctors and on vulnerable patients. But what’s been ignored is the disproportionate number of women it could affect.

At its heart, of course, this is simply business as usual: women are no strangers to coercion in healthcare, and the NHS’s relationship with its predominantly female workforce has long been problematic. While women make up 76.7% of the NHS’s 1.3 million employees, only 45% of doctors are female; despite recruitment drives, fewer than 30% of surgeons are women, while two-thirds of consultants are male. No doubt that goes some way to explaining why male doctors earn 20% more than their female counterparts. Figures show that, out of 212 NHS trusts, 198 have a gender pay gap and in 125 the gap is worsening.

But this isn’t simply a money issue: the NHS also has a dismal record on employment rights, discrimination and abuse of its staff. In just one year, nearly 1 in 10 of Unison’s NHS members reported rape, sexual abuse or harassment at work, with 1 in 3 describing such incidents as a “frequent” or “regular” occurrence. Only 15% felt their case was dealt with adequately.

Nor is it just female employees who are affected by the sexism of the NHS. Female patients regularly face discrimination, with their concerns often dismissed as “women’s problems”. For instance, studies have shown how healthcare staff routinely underestimate and undertreat the pain reported by female patients, largely thanks to institutionalised stereotypes about women being oversensitive or over dramatic. Only last year, a Health Minister was forced to admit that “women are not listened to” by the NHS.

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Yet in light of multiple reports of systematic failings in maternity care, including harrowing descriptions of how thousands of women have been subjected to “birth rape” — doctors performing vaginal examinations on women without their consent — it’s hard not to conclude that the problem runs deeper than women simply not “being listened to”. In fact, as we’ve seen during lockdown, the medical establishment seems to have all but forgotten that women exist. At the start of the pandemic, a UN report warned that Covid lockdowns could have “serious consequences to women’s health”, including disruption to reproductive and sexual health services, as well as services to combat gender-based violence. But even its authors couldn’t have foreseen the horror of women being forced to miscarry and give birth on their own, while their partners waited in car parks.

Similarly cruel scenarios played out in the realm of contraceptive rights. For the past two years, many providers of contraception have refused to meet women face to face, even if it meant a woman was unable to remove her interuterine devices (IUDs). As with all battles over reproductive choice, this only pushed the problem underground: this time in the form of grim TikTok videos teaching women how to pull IUDs from their uterus at home.

But such sexism was present in almost every aspect of Covid response, up to and including the manufacturing of vaccines. Male bodies are assumed to be the “default” during clinical trials; even on the rare occasions, such as the Covid vaccine trials, when women are included, questions tend not to be asked about specifically female concerns, such as changes in menstruation.

It was hardly surprising, then, that reports of menstrual irregularities following the jabs were downplayed for months, despite tens of thousands of women reporting changes. Rather than being listed as a side effect or investigated promptly, such concerns were often belittled and diminished. For many women, the only available information they had on the menstrual side effects was via social media — hardly a comforting (or reliable) source of information.

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It is only now, more than a year after the vaccine rollout began, that researchers have begun looking at the extent and cause of the link. It is likely that the changes to menstrual cycles are benign; a number of possible causes have been suggested, with some also occurring with other vaccinations.

But this comes as scant consolation for the women who’ve experienced unexpected side effects and have, yet again, had to fight to be heard. Distrust can be infectious, and many women have been left feeling understandably uncertain about the ability and willingness of healthcare providers to listen to their concerns and to research the effects of the vaccine on their bodies. Is it any wonder that young women remain one of the cohorts most likely to refuse the jab?

So it seems natural that the NHS vaccine mandate would strike a particular chord with female staff. The policy might not be intrinsically misogynistic — after all, it will affect male staff too — but it’s not inconceivable that female staff will feel particularly alienated. Women possess an already precarious grip on their own bodily autonomy, and for many, their relationship with the NHS, both as patients and as employees, is beset with mistrust and coercion. The constant battle to try and retain control of their own healthcare decisions and the encroaching powerlessness they feel has now begun to even seep into their career.

And yet, it seems peculiar that the same people who pride themselves on supporting a woman’s right to choose in other settings — such as abortion — find no issue in coercively demanding retrospective changes to contracts that further strip the rights of its predominantly female workforce. The progressive emphasis on the right to choose, it seems, only applies if you decide to make the right choice.

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Whether or not the NHS vaccine mandate goes ahead — and it seems increasingly doubtful that an overstretched NHS can afford to sack 70,000 employees — for many women who feel deeply resentful of the mandate, the damage has already been done. To them it must seem galling that, after demanding so much from staff, including expecting them to work in Covid-ridden hospitals with minimal protection, the NHS now feels entitled to discard them for the sin of attempting to cling on to their bodily autonomy.

Even if the threat is removed, the continuing willingness of the NHS to disregard women, now with the encouragement of those who were once allies, will be the final straw for many. As its female staff are now discovering, the NHS remains institutionally sexist — and it will take more than a few rainbows and ‘claps for carers’ to cure it.

That’s not necessarily because they’re wrong. It’s because they are imprecise: the pundits won’t fully commit to anything. “The year ahead will be difficult for Boris Johnson,” that sort of thing. Whatever happens, it’ll be hard to say whether that prediction came true or not.

What’s much more worthwhile is making clear, well-defined, falsifiable forecasts, with fixed timetables: forecasts that commit you to say “OK, I got that wrong.”

I had a go here, here and here during the pandemic (an embarrassing number of which have been wrong). But since it’s the new year, I thought I might stake my own reputation on a few forecasts for 2022.

To do so, I’m going to use the Phil Tetlock “superforecasting” model, of giving lots of forecasts with levels of confidence. So I might say it’s 60% likely that Boris Johnson will have another child in 2022, or that there’s only a 10% chance that Keir Starmer will be prime minister by the end of the year. At the end of the year, I’ll look at all my forecasts. Ideally, about 60% of my 60%-confident forecasts should have come true, and about 10% of my 10%-confident forecasts, and so on[1.  Ideally ideally, I’d have made hundreds of forecasts and you could get a really good sample to see how well-calibrated I am. But unfortunately that’s not going to happen, because calculating these takes ages.].

I’ve used the prediction site Metaculus for my questions. When the site had a good question on it already, I’ve used that; when I needed to make up my own, I’ve done that. I’ve linked to the questions so you can make your own predictions and see what the wider Metaculus community thinks.

Coronavirus

I think that this year will see things return pretty much to normal in Britain. Every so often there’ll be a bit of a flare-up, and some people will call for an immediate return to mandatory masks and closed pubs and all that. But 90% of the population aged over 12 has now had at least one jab and 60% have had three, and most people have probably had the actual disease as well (13 million confirmed cases, which is likely an undercount by at least 60%). So the actual risk to British people is low.

That said, about 100 people are still dying every day with Covid. That sounds bad, and it is, but it’s only about one in every 16 deaths in the UK. Still, if it carries on at that rate for the whole year, we’d expect another 35,000 to 40,000 deaths this year. It may not carry on at that rate all year, but I can’t imagine it’ll drop so much that we see fewer than 20,000. So I’d say it’s 75% likely that we see 20,000 or more deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test in Britain in 2022.

Also, I think we’ll get a few scares from new variants. The WHO has announced five “variants of concern” since the pandemic began, the most recent being Omicron. Given a base rate of about 2.5 a year so far, it’s pretty likely that we’ll see more this year. Whether any of them will be as devastating as Delta or Alpha is a bigger question, but I’d say it’s 90% likely that the WHO will announce at least one new variant of concern in 2022.

Relatedly, if new VoCs do arise, will one of them overtake Omicron as the most commonly detected strain of Covid in the world? Again, I think this is pretty likely – I’d say there’s only a 30% chance that Omicron will be dominant by next January. Six weeks ago we’d never heard of Omicron and Delta was dominant; the original Covid was overtaken by Alpha only eight months or so after it was declared a pandemic. So far no variant has remained dominant for more than a few months and Omicron appears to be petering out in South Africa.

Predictions:

More than 20,000 people will die within 28 days of a positive Covid test in the UK in 2022 (75%)

The WHO will add another variant to their Variants of Concern in 2022 (90%)

Omicron will be the globally dominant strain of Covid at the end of 2022 (30%)

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Vaccinations

The UK’s booster campaign has rolled out with impressive speed since it was announced in September. But there have been suggestions that we will need to do annual Covid jabs, as we do for flu. So I predict it is likely (65%) that we will offer fourth jabs to healthy British adults before the end of 2022.

Not that I think we should do this. I think the vaccines we’ve already had will probably protect people very effectively against severe disease and death even once the measurable antibodies have declined, and I think each new jab will do lots more good in the arms of unvaccinated people in lower-income countries than they will in the arm of a triple-jabbed pensioner in Reading. But given that governments have a duty to look after their own citizens, and, more pressingly, a need to curry favour with those citizens to avoid being voted out, I think it’s pretty likely that we’ll do it. Metaculus forecasters think it’s likely in the US, as well.

The important thing will be whether we vaccinate the world, and especially the poorest countries. It should be said that despite a widespread and understandable feeling that the West has hoarded all the vaccines, almost 60% of the world’s population has received at least one jab, and even lower-middle income countries (which include places like Bangladesh and Egypt) have vaccinated more than 50%.

But the truly poor countries – places like Afghanistan, Sudan, North Korea and many sub-Saharan nations – are lagging badly behind, at only about 8.5% coverage. It’s been speeding up, and in richer countries vaccinations have followed an S-shaped curve – slowly, then quicker and quicker, then slowing down again. But looking at the curve on the Our World in Data page, it looks like the low-income countries are taking off at about a quarter the speed that the rich ones did.

It took rich nations about six months to get to 50% coverage: the world makes vaccines faster now, but also there are still huge logistical and incentive problems for getting those vaccines to poorer countries. I’d guess that between 30% and 60% of inhabitants of the world’s poorest countries will have had at least one jab by 2022. I think it’s also pretty likely (75%) that at least one country will still have fewer than 10% vaccine coverage, just because there are a lot of poor countries, some of which have basically no working health infrastructure.

Predictions:

The UK will authorise fourth doses of Covid vaccines for healthy adults in 2022 (65%)

What percentage of people in low-income countries will have had at least one dose of a vaccine by 2023? – between 30% and 60%

At least one nation will have less than 10% of its population vaccinated with at least one dose by 2023 (75%)

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Climate

The world will continue to warm, on average, over the next few years. There’s too much carbon in the atmosphere already for that to change.

But there’s a lot of variability from year to year. Most years are somewhat hotter than the one before, but not always: of the 20 years leading up to 2020, 13 have been hotter than the previous year, and seven have been cooler, according to the Met Office. So the base rate is that it’s about 65% likely that 2022 will be warmer than 2021.

That said, 2021 has been a relatively cool year, due to La Niña, an atmospheric and oceanic phenomenon that brings cold water to the surface of the oceans. La Niña finished some months ago, so it shouldn’t affect 2022. I think it’s therefore very likely (85%) that 2022 will be hotter than 2021, when the data eventually comes in.

Prediction:

The global average surface temperature in 2022 will be higher than it was in 2021 (85%)

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Energy

There’s a cruel joke that goes to the effect that “fusion energy is 30 years away and always will be”. That said, in the last few years, there’s been a lot more excitement about it, and several new companies have started up, with nearly two billion dollars of funding backing them.

It’s very unlikely that fusion energy will reach any of its milestones – “ignition” or “breakeven” or profitability or anything – this year, and pretty unlikely that they’ll do it this decade. But I do think that the excitement will carry on building. According to a survey by the Fusion Industry Association, there are “at least 35” fusion companies around the world, most of which have been founded in the last 10 years. I think it’s likely (65%) that number will go up in 2022, as the technical questions continue to be answered, and as investors and entrepreneurs get more excited about the possibility of a viable, profitable industry.

Also, the cost of solar energy has plummeted over the past decades. It will almost certainly continue to do so, but since it is already cheaper than any form of fossil fuel, cost is no longer the sticking point. Now, the bottleneck for renewable energy is making it available when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing – having loads of sunshine in August is no good for heating your house in December.

There are various ways of doing that, such as installing cables between countries, so the UK’s offshore wind can supply Spain when it’s windy, and Spain’s solar can supply the UK when it’s sunny. But the most obvious is storage, and the most obvious form of electricity storage is batteries.

The cost of electricity storage has also dropped enormously – according to Bloomberg, it’s gone from a global average of about $300 per megawatt-hour in 2018 to $138 in 2021, mainly driven by the electric car industry. Despite supply chain issues and increased cost of various raw materials, mainly metals, I think that’s probably going to carry on – I think it’s 80% likely that the next Bloomberg report will find that the global average drops in 2022.

We’ll still rely on fossil fuels for some years to come. But I think in 2022 we’ll see some of the pieces of the zero-carbon future start to come together.

Predictions:

There will be more fusion companies at the end of 2022 than there were at the end of 2021 (65%)
The cost of battery storage will be lower per megawatt-hour at the end of 2022 than it was at the end of 2021(80%)

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Have we seen the end of Covid?

By Tom Chivers

Medicine

The biggest thing in medicine this year has been the Covid vaccines. And they’re pretty astonishing things. Remember that at the start of 2020, there were zero approved mRNA vaccines in the world: now billions of people have been given one, and millions of lives have been saved.

You can use mRNA vaccines for pretty much any disease, and in the next few years we’ll doubtless see them for all sorts of things. One that really interests me is cancer. Cancer “vaccines” aren’t like vaccines for measles or Covid – they’re treatments, given to people who have already been diagnosed with the disease, rather than prophylactics given to people at risk of contracting them. As I understand it, it involves presenting the immune system with the RNA sequence for a protein specific to that patient’s cancer, which will help the body fight that cancer. It’s a sort of personalised advance on existing immunotherapy, which has already turned various previously fatal cancers into largely manageable chronic illnesses. So this could be a really big deal in coming years.

Lots of drug companies have plans to make cancer mRNA vaccines. For instance, BioNTech has four ongoing Phase II trials. I think it’s pretty likely that we’ll hear good news from at least one of them, and that a Phase III trial with thousands of participants will be announced. Let’s say 55%.

Prediction:

A Phase III trial of at least one of BioNTech’s cancer mRNA vaccines will be announced in 2022(55%).

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Football

Until a week or so ago Liverpool were one point off the lead and looking good: then they drew with Spurs, lost bizarrely to Leicester after missing a penalty, and then drawing with Chelsea despite being two-nil up after half an hour. And Man City should have lost to Arsenal but Arsenal decided to be Arsenal and gave away a penalty and had a man sent off within 10 minutes and threw it away.

So now Liverpool are 11 points off the top (albeit with a game in hand) and let’s face it the title race is over in January. I reckon only about a 10% chance of turning it around. Still, there’s always the Champions League.

Prediction: Liverpool will win the league this year (10%)

Conclusion

I wanted to add another couple of questions, but they’re hard to do good data on. For instance, I bet that global extreme poverty will be lower in 2022 than it was in 2021, as it has been almost every year for the last 40. But we won’t get good data for a few years. I also bet that even though the world will get better on most metrics, such as life expectancy, wealth, etc, an increasing share of people will still think that it’s getting worse, because that’s how we work. But that’s hard to get into a straightforward question, and again, even if we could, the data for 2022 won’t be around until 2025 or something anyway. Still, I think those things are probably true.

My final prediction is that these predictions will not be very accurate. I’d love it if you would have a go and see if you can do better.

More ambiguously, last week there were about 6,000 hospital admissions with Covid in South Africa, all of which were presumably Omicron since the variant is now dominant there. That’s well below the July peak of about 15,000 a week, although there’s a lag between infection and hospitalisation.

This sort of news has led to people thinking that it’s much less deadly than Delta. As the Omicron wave looms over Britain, that sort of hope keeps us sane.

But how much can we trust that hope? The Prime Minister has promised to ramp up the booster programme, saying that everybody over 18 would be vaccinated by 31 December – about a million people a day. Can that really be possible? And if it were, would that be enough, or are we going to need something more than the “Plan B” restrictions that are already in place.

First, we need to know if it really is less deadly than the other variants. It’s not as clear-cut as all that. South Africa has only fully vaccinated about a quarter of its population, but it has had three large waves of infection: very probably, by now, most of the population has had the disease. So it’s not possible to directly compare the Omicron wave with the Delta wave: Omicron is working its way through a population with much higher immunity.

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The trouble is, that won’t be true in the UK. When Delta came here, we were already highly vaccinated: almost every adult had had at least one jab. At least some of the reasons why Omicron appears to be less of a threat to South Africans don’t apply here. We’re also a much older population.

Closer to home, Danish data looking at 2,417 cases of Omicron found only 19 people had been admitted to hospital. But again, it’s hard to know what to make of it. The patients involved were mainly young – the median age is about 30. And given an average lag of about a week between infection and hospitalisation, and since about 2,000 of the cases were detected in the last week, it might not be as promising as it sounds on the surface.

The most recent UK Health Security Agency technical briefing similarly finds that “None of the cases is known to have been hospitalised or died”. But their data only goes to 6 December. By 6 December, there had only been 260 cases of Omicron in the country, most of which had been detected in the previous few days. Since then, there have been at least 10 hospitalisations and at least one death linked to the new variant. Things may become clearer in the coming weeks.

It’s perfectly possible that Omicron is less dangerous than Delta to a person with prior immunity. But we can’t be sure yet. And we should also remember that while deadliness — virulence — is important, it’s not as important as transmissibility.

Imagine the following scenario. You have a disease with an R of four — that is, on average, each person with the disease gives it to four more people. And it also has an infection fatality rate (IFR) of 4%, so it kills one person in every 25 that it infects. (These are made-up numbers for illustration.)

You follow that disease through 10 generations. The first person would infect four more; those four would infect a further 16, and so on. By the time you reached the 10th generation, you would have about a million new cases – and adding all the generations together, you’d get a total of 1.4 million cases. Of those 1.4 million, about 56,000 would die.

Imagine that a new variant arrived which was more deadly: which kills 5% of victims. It would be worse. You’d expect about 70,000 deaths, 25% more than before.

But now imagine that a new variant arrived which was more transmissible, by the same margin. Each person infects five people, on average. Suddenly the first one infects five, those five infect 25, those 25 infect 125. By the time you reach the 10th generation, it’s almost 10 million new cases, and about 12 million in total. Even if it still only had an IFR of 4%, it would kill about 480,000 people – nine times as many as the original.

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So even if Omicron is less deadly, if it’s very good at spreading through the population, it could quickly overwhelm the health service just through sheer weight of numbers.

The question, then, is: is it more transmissible? There was much excitement over the weekend, when the case numbers appeared to be slowing there — after zooming up to 19,000 a day, they dropped back to 17,000, and people started to wonder whether it had peaked. But then the South African health service released a new tranche of data on Sunday, with another 37,000 cases — the apparent slowdown appears to have been a reporting backlog.

Even taking that into account, Omicron isn’t doing quite the mad upwards dash that it was in late November. But it’s still escalating, in a presumably fairly immune population. And it seems to be spreading even faster in the UK: Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, told the Science Media Centre that “In South Africa the latest R estimate is about 2.2. For the UK the estimate is 3.7 which is doubling every 2 to 3 days.” The UK HSA technical report suggests (p19) that it spreads around twice as easily as Delta in the UK population. If that’s true, it would easily overwhelm any gains from reduced virulence, even if they’re real.

So what does it all mean? Over the weekend, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine released a model of how Omicron might spread. It included scenarios with different assumptions about how good the new variant is at evading immunity, and about how good the boosters are at building that immunity back up. It also assumed that we’d keep the Plan B advice in place (masks in some public spaces, people working from home if they can, some vaccine-status checking) and that the NHS would administer about 500,000 new booster jabs a day.

The most likely scenario is that the variant is pretty good at evading immunity, but that boosters work pretty well. Under that scenario, the LSHTM model’s projections look fairly bleak: a peak of about 6,000 hospital admissions a day, compared to about 4,000 a day at the January 2021 peak. And they think between about 40,000 and 50,000 people would die of Covid between 1 December and 30 April.

They say in the model that they have assumed Omicron is no less deadly than Delta, given prior immunity. They might be wrong about that, but as I’ve shown, we can’t be sure. It’s certainly very possible that we’ll be looking at another wave of deaths comparable to the first or second one.

Will Johnson’s booster boosterism make much of a difference? I doubt it. It takes at least a week for boosters to have a significant effect on your immunity, and for some people more like two. Even if we started vaccinating a million people a day from tomorrow, the impact of that wouldn’t be felt until around Christmas. We’re not going to start vaccinating a million people tomorrow: we’ve been averaging 400,000 a day recently, fewer than the LSHTM model assumes, and the NHS thinks that we’ll still be boosting well into January and February and we’ll only have offered everyone a jab by the new year. Hopefully it’ll ramp up quickly, but if we’re relying on boosters, then most of the January caseload will be baked in already.

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And here’s the really worrying thing. Sajid Javid, the health secretary, told MPs last night that 200,000 people have been infected by Omicron yesterday alone. This was such a huge claim that people assumed he’d got mixed up: perhaps he meant 200,000 people are infected? Or have been? But apparently not. There were about 50,000 cases reported in the UK on 10 December. The ONS infection survey suggests that we only detect 40% of them: that is, there were really 125,000. On the 10th, 19% of cases were Omicron. That is about 25,000 cases. But cases detected on the 10th were probably infected on the 7th, six days ago. And if it’s doubling every two days, then that 25,000 has had time to become 200,000.

For reference, that’s about the number of daily cases that we had in early January 2021, the peak of the second wave, by which time we’d already been in full lockdown for a month. We are not in lockdown now, and several more doublings are probably already locked in. If Javid is correct, then Omicron had better be much less deadly, or there could be real trouble ahead. We’ll know if he’s right in about three days. 

So should we be talking about restrictions?

The restrictions we put in place for the first and second waves were intended to avoid something far worse. The 16 March 2020 paper by Imperial College London predicted 500,000 deaths if no measures were taken. That was what sent us into lockdown. The actual death toll of 40,000 or so in the first wave was a fraction of what it could have been.

But we are nowhere near where we were early last year. We’re now talking about something that is on the level of a very bad flu season. Full-on March 2020 lockdown is probably an overreaction.

But the LSHTM model thinks that we could prevent about two-thirds of those deaths and hospitalisations by going to full lockdown,[1. It actually only models the most optimistic and most pessimistic scenarios under the various restrictions. But in both of those scenarios, about two-thirds of deaths and hospitalisations are prevented under strictest lockdown, and about a third under the less stringent Stage 2 restrictions. I have assumed that the intermediate scenarios see roughly similar numbers.] and about one-third by introducing, right now, some less strict measures, equivalent to Stage 2 of the “roadmap out of lockdown” from spring: the biggest part of that was probably that only two households or six individuals could meet indoors.

It is a non-trivial intervention that could slow the course of Omicron; it might buy some time for the sped-up booster programme; and it would mean we wouldn’t have to cross our fingers and hope that Omicron is less deadly than Delta. Obviously politicians will be reluctant to ruin another Christmas. But relying on boosters alone is a big risk, especially since no one but Johnson seems to think we can hit the target.

Yet still it hurts. He’d also developed a moisture lesion, the start of a pressure sore, on his lower back — a consequence of not being repositioned regularly. Joseph’s death wasn’t caused by anything we did, but what we were unable to do. Had we had our full team of staff, I’m sure that we could have moved him more regularly and perhaps have prevented the lesion, which no doubt hastened his decline.

One of us could have sat with him and fed him, listened to him and held his hand. But we simply don’t have the time. The loss of one permanent member of staff a few weeks ago because she refused to be vaccinated, and the resulting reliance on agency staff, has had a devastating impact on the standard of care in our home. When it becomes compulsory next April for staff to be jabbed unless they have a medical exemption — at the moment care homes can decide their own policy — the situation will only deteriorate. Some estimates suggest more than 100,000 unvaccinated care home workers could be forced to quit.

Tonight’s shift is intensely busy, as always. We have 30 residents in our private care home in Sheffield. They all need feeding, washing and changing — and I don’t stop for a moment. It’s six hours into my shift when I’m stopped by my colleague Lisa. Grabbing my arm, she practically throws me into the room and onto the sofa and tells me to sit down for five minutes.

“You’ve not stopped,” she says. “Eat something!” I check the clock. She is right. It is almost 1.30am and I haven’t eaten a thing since I clocked on at 7pm. The only time I’ve stopped is to pop to the toilet and take a few sips of cold coffee. It is time for a quick break.

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I sit down to eat a sandwich, but a pile of paperwork sits on my desk and I can’t ignore it. As the senior member of staff on duty that night, it’s my responsibility to be in charge of the medications, so I might as well audit the drugs paperwork while I eat my dinner. It will save time later.

Barely five minutes have passed when another colleague, Sheila, asks for some help moving one of our residents, Anne, who has soiled herself. Many of our residents are incontinent and accidents are common, but it’s often impossible for care workers to move residents on their own, particularly when they’re only 5ft 2ins like Sheila. If we don’t clean and move them swiftly, bed sores can develop and that’s when residents are at risk of infections which can be fatal.

We find Anne in some discomfort and distress. Who knows how long she’s been lying in her mess? The staff tonight are spread even more thinly than usual: Clare, one of the younger members of the team, called in sick and no agency nurse has turned up. We clean Anne up and make her comfortable and she sleeps.

It’s a small consolation. I have worked in the care sector for ten years and while we’ve always been busy, it’s becoming clear that things are dangerously close to breaking point now. The pandemic was stressful but now we have the added burden of being short-staffed. Carly, the unvaccinated nurse, left a fortnight ago and we are unable to find a permanent replacement.

Carly is one of many careworkers who refuses to have the Covid vaccination. She’s not what you’d call an ‘anti-vaxxer’ because she’s had other vaccinations such as flu; she simply didn’t trust this one. She felt it hadn’t been tested rigorously enough and could harm her health in the future. I’ve no idea why. The rest of us tried to persuade her that it was safer — for the residents, herself and us. It felt like another level of protection.

But for whatever reason, Carly was adamant she didn’t want it. She initially thought the Government might perform a U-turn but when it became clear they wouldn’t, she looked for a new job. She’s working in a school now.

Of course, it’s a shame. She loved her job and she was good at it. But if she’s going to put others at risk, I can’t blame the Government for wanting her out.

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Yet her departure leaves us in the lurch and it makes me nervous about what lies ahead. Although I have a 36-hour-a-week contract, I’m regularly working up to 60 hours — all for £9.60 per hour and I’m exhausted. There’s no bonus for overtime. I suppose I should count my blessings. I know of another home that has lost four members of staff who refused to have the vaccine.

Once Anne is cleaned, I return to the staffroom to finish the drugs paperwork. I’m always terrified of making a mistake when I’m tired. Only two weeks ago I’d been so busy rushing from room to room that I’d forgotten to give someone his epilepsy drug. He ended up having a seizure and although we found him in time and he was fine, I felt dreadful. I held my hands up. I knew it was my fault. But with so few staff, mistakes are going to happen. Not long ago a lady fell in our lounge area and broke her hip. I watched it happen, almost in slow motion but I couldn’t get to her in time. Would that have happened if we’d had enough staff members? Possibly. But I couldn’t help but feel she might have been saved if someone had been able to keep a closer eye on her that day.

I thought things might improve when the pandemic started to subside this spring. Like many frontline workers, we had little in the way of PPE at first and had no idea what we were dealing with. Watching people deteriorate when they got the virus was horrific. I’ll never forget them desperately gasping for breath, as if they were drowning. We couldn’t do anything except prop them up on their side or turn them over onto their fronts. That seemed to help. But we lost seven of our residents and there would be many nights where I’d go home in tears.

The terror and paranoia of bringing the virus home has never really left me, even now. After my shift ended, I would undress at work and put my uniform in a tightly sealed bag to take home and boil wash. But when I got home, I was fearful that I still had the virus on me, so I’d strip off in the hallway and rush up to the shower to scrub myself clean before I went anywhere near my daughters. My husband would grab the bag, put the uniform in the washing machine and then thoroughly scrub his hands.

When the vaccine arrived, it felt like we’d been saved. I managed to have mine early in the year and I’ve now had all three. I don’t think anyone should be forced to have the vaccine, but I still can’t understand how people in our sector are reluctant to get jabbed. We have people in our homes in their 90s who are completely bedridden with dementia. Even though they’ve been vaccinated, they will be among the most vulnerable if this new Omicron variant takes hold, as it looks like it will.

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For the moment we’re relying on agency staff to plug the gaps but this is never ideal. Although they’re competent enough, the people who need the care can become upset if they see a face they don’t recognise. There’s no continuity of care. Last week, one of our more vocal residents got spooked. She doesn’t speak much English and was screaming and crying about the new staff member.

And so I feel pessimistic about the next few months. We are currently Covid-free in the home but I don’t expect that to last. Our residents have all been vaccinated so we know they have some level of protection and that’s reassuring. But it’s the ‘stepdown beds’ — people who arrive in the home for temporary care straight from the local hospital — who we constantly worry about. Although they are tested before they arrive and they’re put in isolation and tested again on Day 5 of their stay, we’re all worried that one of them will bring in the new variant.

Then what do we do? Will it mean another lockdown? Families unable to visit their loved ones again? Although I hope it doesn’t come to that, we are all expecting it.

Don’t get me wrong: I love this job and I don’t want to leave. But there have been many nights where I’ve come home — sometimes after 16 hours on my feet — and I wonder if it’s worth it. We are all scrambling. And things are only going to get worse.

This is the official Chinese narrative: that Covid 19 should be traced back to this “earliest onset date” when Chen visited a hospital dental clinic. The World Health Organisation promoted this story in its study group report earlier this year into origins of the virus, influencing global discussion. Yet this “first case” merely highlights the duplicity of Beijing in obscuring the truth about the birth of this deadly disease — along with the complicity of the global public health body and so much of the scientific establishment in promoting the Communist regime’s deceptive stance.

The extent of the dishonesty became startlingly obvious after the WHO’s patsy report was published in March. Data for Chen, this heavily-scrutinised patient, seemed confused since the sample sequence listed in its documents belonged to another man who had died after falling sick later in December 2019. Chen’s profile actually matched the sequence of a patient listed as becoming ill on December 16. This was one of the cases that frightened local doctors — leading ophthalmologist Li Wenliang to warn colleagues about a contagious new virus, only for him to be detained by police for “rumour-mongering”. His death several weeks later from the disease sparked an eruption of grief and fury on social media.

Chen’s case could not be hidden, since it had been highlighted by Ai Fen, another doctor at Wuhan Central Hospital, who was also reprimanded by party chiefs after sharing details about the alarming new virus. The stricken accountant, who lived in the dense residential district closest to the Wuhan Institute of Virology site in the southern part of the city, had no known links to the infamous Huanan Seafood Market. After failing to respond to treatment, he travelled some distance from his district hospital to the renowned emergency department at the major hospital where his relative worked.

Last month, Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, declared in Science that Chen was not really the first known case. He argued correctly that the WHO had bungled its chronology — but then pointed instead to a female seafood vendor who fell ill on December 11, saying Chen developed his symptoms five days later. The existence of this new Patient Zero sparked excitable headlines around the world about the pandemic being triggered by a spillover from animals sold at the bustling market in the central Chinese city. “The latest report adds weight to the theory that the virus originated from wildlife sold at the market, rather than as a leak from a Wuhan virology lab,” stated The Guardian.

Yet as one expert told me, this latest study — eagerly lapped up by docile science correspondents — simply “piled wishful thinking on deception”. The market was discounted even by Chinese authorities last year as birthplace of the pandemic after being challenged by academic studies, and again in a paper co-authored by the country’s top infectious diseases expert six months ago. It was more likely to have been the location of a super-spreader event. Despite Beijing’s efforts to control the narrative, stifle dissent and suppress data, there is still considerable evidence in circulation to counter the concept that either of these two cases was Patient Zero.

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Science journals have been corrupted by China

By Ian Birrell

I have previously revealed how Professor Yu Chuanhua, a professor of biostatistics at Wuhan University placed in charge of collating official data, told a Chinese health journal that he had 47,000 cases on his database by late February. These included two more suspected cases on November 14 and 21. The Health Times article even included a screenshot exposing personal details of one of them: Patient Su, a 61-year-old who lived about a mile from a lab run by China’s Centre for Disease Control and less than three miles from the downtown Wuhan Institute of Virology site — but more than 13 miles from the wildlife market.

Other early cases included Connor Reed, a 25-year-old Briton teaching in Wuhan, who said he grew ill on November 25 and that his condition was later confirmed as the new coronavirus. US intelligence was reported to have issued alerts to allies at end of that month after analysing communication intercepts and satellite images collected in preceding weeks. The Lancet published a landmark early pandemic paper by Chinese scientists on a cluster of initial Wuhan cases, which recorded the first patient on December 1 — and stated that three of the first four cases had no confirmed exposure to the market. Then a well-sourced article in the South China Morning Post disclosed nine confirmed cases by the end of November, involving four men and five women aged between 39 and 79 with the first diagnosis on November 17. Finally it was discovered that specimen data records from four Covid patients were created on December 10 by scientists at a Wuhan military hospital, including for a woman aged 21 listed as coming from close to Wuhan Institute of Virology’s older city centre site and another high-security university lab carrying out bat coronavirus experiments on genetically-modified mice.

There were also whispers among well-connected scientists. Several academics spoke publicly of hearing about the disease by mid-December — including Ian Lipkin, an epidemiologist at Columbia University honoured by China for work on the first SARS epidemic earlier this century, who said he knew about it on December 15. Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health law in Washington, said he heard in mid-December from a friend in Wuhan about a novel coronavirus and that “it looks very serious”. It seems strange that George Gao, the Oxford-educated virologist who is director of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, claimed to have found out about the disease more than two weeks later, on December 30 — the day before the WHO was tipped off by Taiwan.

The issue of early cases is clouded by geo-politics and an intensifying superpower struggle. Donald Trump’s outbursts — “the China virus” — during his presidency were often intemperate, and tended to inflame opinions on both sides. Yet his administration concluded with a carefully-worded State Department document claiming researchers at Wuhan Institute of Virology “became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses”. David Asher, who led the inquiries, told me three scientists were believed to have fallen ill in the second week of November, 2019, with “credible” information from a trusted foreign source that the wife of one researcher died later that month.

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Beijing's useful idiots

By Ian Birrell

Scientific analysis based on dynamics of disease outbreaks and genome evolution suggests a most likely emergence between mid-October and mid-November — which tallies with censored reports, circumstantial evidence, leaks and US intelligence claims. Chen’s case actually implies that the virus had spread significantly around the city by the second week of December, since he lived almost 20 miles from the centre and the notorious market.

None of this proves anything definitive about the first case of SARS-Cov-2 — the strain of coronavirus that causes Covid — let alone its origins. Worobey argues it may still be possible to obtain conclusive evidence from these late December cases, although evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom is more pessimistic. “Normally in an outbreak investigation you trace the contacts of known patients backward in time to find earlier cases,” he tweeted recently. “But for SARS-CoV-2 investigations in Wuhan, it’s going in the opposite direction!”

Yet this vexatious issue does raise two big questions. First, why has China gone to such lengths to conceal crucial data about the origins of this disease, given the critical importance in understanding the cause of this public health disaster? Certainly, it is impossible to ignore the coincidence that it erupted in the city that hosts Asia’s biggest bat coronavirus research centre, located far from the dark places where scientists from the lab and their associates collect samples from bats in southern China and — according to recent revelations — possibly eight other nations. Not least when there are so many unanswered riddles swirling around the secretive Wuhan labs over the real nature of their research, the erratic behaviour of their most prominent scientist and their true relationship with key Western funding bodies.

We know also from Chinese media reports — later deleted from the internet — that Chinese firms were sequencing the genetic code of SARS-CoV-2 before the WHO even learned about the new disease, with one passing its findings to the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. And it is clear from early cases involving infected medical workers and family members that human transmission was known about well before such critical information was shared beyond its borders. Bear in mind that modelling experts suggest the number of global cases could have been cut by 95% if China had moved to contain the disease three weeks earlier instead of pressing ahead with New Year festivities that involve the biggest annual migration of humans on the planet.

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What a Wuhan lab leak would really mean

By Ian Birrell

Nor is there any sign yet of an animal host for natural zoonotic transmission. So the second, profoundly-disturbing question raised by this issue is to ask why leading scientists and their funding bodies effectively colluded with China to stifle public debate over a possible laboratory cause of this pandemic — aided by swathes of the news media, leading science journals, science administrators and most of the Left that seemed to loathe Trump more than a horribly repressive Chinese dictatorship.

A series of email conversations have emerged through freedom of information requests showing how key scientists held discussions that led to publication of influential papers dismissing “conspiracy theories” — despite several of those figures initially fearing that some kind of lab incident sparked this public health disaster. Participants included Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and presidential adviser; Francis Collins, head of the major US funding body that backed high-risk experiments into bat coronaviruses in Wuhan; Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of The Wellcome Trust; and Sir Patrick Vallance, the British government’s chief scientific officer.

The latest communications obtained by US Right To Know, a public health campaign group, disclose how James Le Duc, the former director of a top-level biosafety lab in Texas who had trained Wuhan researchers, told the ex-president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene last year that it was “certainly possible a lab accident was the source of the epidemic and I also agree that we can’t trust the Chinese government”.

Intriguingly, soon after the pandemic erupted, Le Duc wrote to Yuan Zhiming, head of biosafety at Wuhan Institute of Virology and its most senior Communist party official, with a barrage of questions about samples, security, inventories and handling of live viruses. These included asking about disgruntled employees with access to coronavirus stocks, signs of unusual illnesses among staff, team members visiting the wildlife market and if anyone was “conducting gain of function research, recombination studies or any other studies that may have resulted in the creation of the nCoV [novel coronavirus]”?  Le Duc said he was being peppered with questions from “senior officials and major reputable papers” and stressed the need to “aggressively address these rumours and presumably false accusations quickly and provide definitive, honest information to counter misinformation”.

Instead, China built a wall of lies and obfuscation. The utter failure of the Western scientific establishment to follow evidence wherever it led — whether for personal, political or financial reasons — helped impede investigations and, given their lack of transparency, duped the public at a time when we need trust in our political and scientific leaders. Little wonder Gilles Demaneuf, a member of the Drastic team of researchers that winkled out critical evidence to challenge China’s narrative, argues the response would have been far tougher if the pandemic had emerged elsewhere. “It would be deemed unacceptable if it was in Sierra Leone or Pakistan, so why should it be different with China,” he asked.

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Did scientists stifle the lab-leak theory?

By Ian Birrell

The most dramatic Drastic revelation came two months ago with details of a 2018 submission to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency by EcoHealth Alliance — the New York-based body headed by Peter Daszak, the controversial British scientist who has led efforts to dampen talk of lab leaks. It sought $14.2m for work with his long-term collaborators in Wuhan on a scheme to insert rare cleavage sites into SARS-like coronaviruses collected in the field, then conduct experiments on live bats. This particular request — supposedly aimed at “defusing the threat of bat-borne coronaviruses” — was rejected on risk grounds. Curiously, there has been fierce debate over the furin cleavage site on SARS-CoV-2, a feature not found on similar types of coronavirus that allows it to enter so efficiently into human cells.

Two years on, it remains impossible to prove the cause of this catastrophe. The Communist regime led by President Xi Jinping should be a pariah for blocking investigations to discover the cause of this cruel disease given the terrible impact on the planet (and indeed for the crimes against humanity being inflicted on Muslim minorities in Xinjiang). Instead, it is preparing for another parade of its power with a global showcase as host of the Winter Olympics. Meanwhile we see how the WHO still kowtows to Beijing, skipping the use of ‘Xi’ when rifling through the Greek alphabet to name the latest variant of the virus ‘Omicron’ in deference to China’s leader. This symbolises how as wave after wave of this mutating virus washes over the world, there seems still the most astonishing global complacency over Beijing’s duplicitous actions that, regardless of the origins, have led to millions of fatalities.

He was the one who undermined Trump’s “just the flu” narrative; he was the one who told us that the virus wasn’t going to disappear in the spring. When Trump was touting the unproven benefits of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid, Fauci stepped in with a reality check — and yet always, somehow, stayed just enough in the President’s good graces to keep his job.

And so, after last year’s election, we greeted Fauci as a hero who’d emerged safely, against all odds, from behind enemy lines. Journalists sat with him for breathless interviews, asking how he “survived” his time as Trump’s advisor. Time magazine wrote, jubilantly: “Anthony Fauci Is Finally Getting to Do His Job”. The New Yorker declared him “America’s Doctor”.

The fact that he was still standing, preaching the gospel of science while Donald Trump slunk away with his tail between his legs, took on its own significance. Fauci was more than the sum of his parts; he was a figurehead. And while he did decry the tragic and unnecessary politicisation of the Covid pandemic from his new perch as Biden’s Chief Medical Advisor, it was a winking sort of neutrality: when the man wishes out loud that “we had a country where people realized the importance of a communal effort,” it’s not like we don’t know which people he’s talking about.

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Will Democrats mask America forever?

By Kat Rosenfield

Given that half the nation wants to canonise him as the Patron Saint of Public Health, it was probably inevitable that Fauci would be ultimately unable to resist buying into his own hype — but it was still remarkable to witness. In a recent interview with Face the Nation, Fauci explained why the criticism he’s weathered from politicians like Senator Ted Cruz, who accused him of lying under oath about what kind of viral research the NIH was funding, is not just distasteful but dangerous.

“They’re really criticizing science because I represent science,” he said. “That’s dangerous. To me, that’s more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me. I’m not going to be around here forever, but science is going to be here forever.”

For some, this statement was nothing more or less than a terrifying profession of absolute power: La science, c’est moi. But let’s be charitable and imagine that what Fauci was trying to say — inelegantly — is not that he believes himself to be synonymous with science, but that other people treat him as such, attacking him as a proxy for the ideas they find offensive.

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Did scientists stifle the lab-leak theory?

By Ian Birrell

The thing is, that’s not really any better. These comments reveal a monumental hubris no matter how you slice it, a conviction that no criticism — whether it’s of him or his ideas — could ever be valid. If he’s not accusing his detractors of heresy for questioning capital-S Science, he’s still accusing them of anti-science bigotry and bad faith — and excusing himself from ever considering the possibility that at least a few of them might have a point.

For those old enough to remember it, this rhetorical style was last used to great effect in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when our leaders waved away any notion of examining how the United States might have come to be seen as an avatar for imperialism, oppression, and Western decadence by declaring that the terrorists simply “hate us for our freedoms.” Fauci invokes the same immunity from self-reflection when he declares of criticism that “anybody who’s looking at this carefully realizes that there’s a distinct anti-science flavor to this.”

Never mind the documented inconsistencies in Fauci’s statements on masking, vaccine mandates, or boosters; never mind his lobbying for continued school closures until Biden’s stimulus bill had passed, which would have negative implications for hundreds of thousands of children; never mind the frustrating and opaque debate surrounding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. The real question is: why do you hate science?!

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How science has been corrupted

By Matthew Crawford

It’s not hard to see the appeal of framing one’s critics as motivated by bigotry, which not only shuts down discussion completely but also has a way of rallying defenders to the cause. Suddenly, science is not about ideas but identity, an ideology with a tribe all its own. It’s a neat trick, this sleight-of-hand. And it is infectious.

The wheels of this social change were already turning before the pandemic. It was mid-2019 when I first encountered one of those rainbow-coloured “in this house we believe” signs, hung on the wall of a local yoga studio like a bible sampler for the Lululemon class. The “beliefs” in question are liberal platitudes, just this side of a thought-terminating cliché:

BLACK LIVES MATTER

WOMEN’S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS

NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL

SCIENCE IS REAL

LOVE IS LOVE

KINDNESS IS EVERYTHING

At first, these signs were just a form of political expression, a way for members of the educated liberal class to recognise other members of their tribe. But the isolation and uncertainty of Covid has kicked this mindset into another gear. SCIENCE IS REAL isn’t a statement expressing the literal existence of science; it’s yard-sign catechism, the shriek of a true believer.

And in this world, science isn’t something we do, a method of systematic structure and study that separates fiction from fact and hypothesis from conclusion; it’s something you believe in, like Santa Claus or alien abduction or the ability of your struggling but spirited football team to come through against all odds and win the championship. Secular people have put their faith in science the way the devout put their faith in a God — right down to anointing the most pious among us as institutional figureheads.

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America's racial fairytales

By Kat Rosenfield

But the result is not just oddly religious, but perverse. Unlike actual science, which is one of the most vital truth-seeking mechanisms we have, this “science” is utterly incurious, hostile to questions, incapable of admitting fault. And while this would be an alarming development at any time, it’s especially bad amid a global catastrophe in which it’s never been more important to stay humble and ask questions, even if they’re politically inconvenient, even if they make powerful people bristle at your insubordination.

We can try to blame Anthony Fauci for this: for accepting the accolades, for licensing his bobblehead likeness, for letting us call the vaccine the “Fauci ouchie,” for buying wholesale into the myth of his own infallibility. But while Fauci may be at fault for getting a bit too high on his own supply, he didn’t appoint himself to this position; we did, when we decided to make him the Science Daddy without whose say-so we can never live normal lives again.

For two years, a frightened populace has looked to Fauci for the answers to impossible questions, for a sense of control amid the uncertainty, for assurance that we’re on the right side of history — even though nobody can tell us exactly what went wrong. We made science a civic religion, and we told Fauci he was the Pope. Unfortunately, he believed us.

The mood is a far cry from the breathless commentary during the first 18 months of the pandemic, when New Zealand was held up as an extraordinary case of pandemic management, contrasted with the disasters in Europe, the UK and US. Indeed, the country’s tough border closures, skilful contact tracing, tough lockdown restrictions, commitment to Zero Covid and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s empathic and inclusive leadership were lauded as a model for the rest of the world.

And yet, contrary to ill-informed hot takes half a world away, New Zealand’s approach had its merits. Following an initial lockdown last year, the country recorded only 1,500 cases and 22 deaths from Covid-19, and succeeded in eliminating the virus in the community. Importantly, this was achieved without significant restrictions on individual liberties or substantial cost to the economy. While the rest of the world has spent the past two years in crisis, New Zealanders have lived remarkably normal lives. Undoubtedly, there was some luck involved, given New Zealand’s isolation from the rest of the world. But, as its neighbour Australia illustrated, isolation is no guarantee of success.

However, this New Zealand model came with two important caveats. First, the cost of normality enjoyed by citizens at home was paid for by its citizens abroad. The country’s harsh border regime, which allocated a limited number of places in a 14-day hotel quarantine system, meant that thousands were stranded abroad, unable to return home, often left facing destitution. Likewise, while the economy thrived, the cost was borne by the tourism industry — 18% of the economy — whose reliance on international visitors left it on the verge of collapse.

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Inside Melbourne's eternal lockdown

By Tom Chodor

Secondly, the New Zealand model could never be sustained long-term, once it became clear that global elimination of the virus was unlikely. As such, there was a need for an exit strategy, which seemed to centre on vaccinating the whole population before the virus got in. This was always a gamble and a race against time; one which Ardern lost this August, when a cautious re-opening of the border to Australia led to the arrival of the Delta variant, and sparked a new outbreak.

Despite the fact no country had managed to eliminate Delta, the Government reverted to its tried and tested approach, closing the limited openings at the border, announcing a snap lockdown, and re-committing to eliminating the virus. But this time, it didn’t work.

While the outbreak was contained to Auckland, the key pillars of New Zealand’s model — contact tracing and tough lockdown restrictions severely curtailing people’s movements — proved no match for the infectiousness of the Delta strain. Case numbers refused to budge, totalling more than 8,400 for the current outbreak, while deaths have nearly doubled to 43. Admitting defeat, the Government formally abandoned elimination as a strategy in October. Nevertheless, Auckland’s “snap lockdown” — meant to last for two weeks — has now dragged on for over 100 days, with predictable consequences for children’s schooling, mental health and the economy.

While the situation still compares very favourably to many parts of the world, New Zealand’s sheen has started to come off. Contrary to its claims of exceptionalism, throughout the current Delta outbreak, it has shown itself to be a normal country just like every other: faced with the same dilemmas, failures, trade-offs and divisions when it comes to dealing with the pandemic. What’s more, it hasn’t necessarily dealt with them any better.

Take vaccination. One consequence of the New Zealand model was complacency when it came to the roll-out, with many convinced that the country could take its time while the pandemic raged elsewhere. As a result, less than 20% of the population was fully vaccinated when Delta arrived in August, leaving it unprepared for the outbreak. In response, the government tied the lifting of lockdowns to the vaccination rate, setting a very high target of 90% before restrictions would be eased.

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New Zealand's Zero Covid delusion

By Tom Chodor

Still, while this was eventually abandoned, 86% of New Zealanders are now double-jabbed, making it one of the most vaccinated countries in the world. As we also saw in Australia, nothing concentrates the mind when it comes to vaccinations like a prolonged lockdown.

This is not to say that the issue hasn’t been divisive. Behind the high overall rates, there remain significant pockets of unvaccinated people in New Zealand, especially in the regions, and among the indigenous Maori population. Higher rates of poverty and disadvantage, and low levels of trust in the Government mean that only 68% of Maori are fully vaccinated, despite repeated efforts to roll out culturally specific and targeted programmes.

Meanwhile, the high rates of poor health outcomes have left the Maori more vulnerable to the virus, leading to demands that any re-opening be delayed until vaccination rates exceed the rest of the country. The Maori Party has been warning of a “modern genocide” if lockdowns are lifted while the virus remains in the community, with some local iwi (tribes) threatening to set up roadblocks to keep Aucklanders from visiting their regions once freedom of travel is restored.

More broadly, despite the high vaccination rates, the Government has not shied from introducing controversial vaccine mandates. With the country slowly opening up, Ardern has described vaccination as “the golden ticket to freedom“, requiring vaccine passes to enter most workplaces, hospitality, retail and entertainment venues. At the moment, unvaccinated people can do little more than shop for essentials, creating a two-tier society and sparking bitter conflicts. The Government has doubled down, stressing the mandate will continue into next year, and showing little sympathy for the unvaccinated minority.

This, in turn, has sparked protests for the first time in the pandemic. When the current outbreak started, commentators mocked a lone demonstrator at an anti-lockdown protest in Auckland. Since then, crowds have grown, with thousands recently marching across the country against lockdowns and the vaccine mandates. While they have not matched the numbers or violence recently seen in Europe, these protests bring together a similar constellation of far-Right agitators, conspiracy theorists, wellness gurus and ordinary citizens increasingly marginalised and excluded from society. It’s part of a wider fragmentation taking hold in the country, with support for the Government’s handling of the pandemic dropping from 80% to 46%. Ardern’s personal popularity has also declined to 34%, while more people now think the country is heading in the wrong direction for the first time since 2008.

This is a far cry from the ‘Team of Five Million’ approach championed by the Government in the first 18 months of the pandemic. And Ardern seems fully aware of this: the Government recently rushed through new laws to lock in many of the draconian restrictions on the unvaccinated, bypassing the usual means of oversight and scrutiny, in a move labelled “a constitutional disgrace” by legal experts.

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What's the point of Australia?

By Shahar Hameiri and Tom Chodor

In short, over the course of the past four months, many of the key features of New Zealand’s pandemic response have been found wanting. Yet old habits die hard. While the rest of the world has largely opened up and travel has begun to stage a comeback, New Zealand’s plan for reopening its borders announced last week remains extremely cautious.

Fully vaccinated citizens will only be able to return from Australia from mid-January, provided that they quarantine at home for seven days. This will be extended to other countries in mid-February, while foreign nationals will not be allowed to enter until the end of next April. There is no detail yet on how long the seven-day quarantine requirement will remain in place, and the tourism sector has reacted with dismay, describing the plan as a “body blow” that will delay its recovery until 2023. For a country approaching a 90% vaccination rate, this seems needlessly restrictive, a relic of the Zero Covid mentality, rather than the long-promised exit strategy.

And this was before the emergence of the new Omicron variant. Here, New Zealand has been depressingly ordinary, following many other countries in shutting the border to non-citizens from the nine ‘high risk’ countries in southern Africa, and holding out the possibility of delaying the border reopening plan. While labelled as ‘temporary’ and intended to buy time to learn more about the new variant, this response highlights the continuing reluctance to finally begin living with Covid.

As the pandemic enters its third year, New Zealand might end up with the worst of both worlds: facing the same problems as everyone else, but persisting with an unsustainable Zero Covid approach to them.

I look at the news photos of armed, masked, black-clad police stopping people in the streets to ask for their digital papers, and I read stories of others arrested for leaving their own house more than the permitted once a day, and I hear Austrian politicians intoning that those who refuse to accede to the injection are to be shunned and scapegoated until they acquiesce.

Then I watch interviews with “ordinary people”, and they say that the “unvaxxed” had it coming. Some of them say that they should all be jailed, these enemies of the people. At best, the “anti-vaxxers” are paranoid and misinformed. At worst they are malicious, and should be punished.

Then I look across the border at Germany. I see that in Germany, politicians are also considering interning the “vaccine hesitant”, and are also discussing enforcing vaccination upon every citizen. By the end of the winter, says Germany’s refreshingly honest health minister, Germans will be “vaccinated, cured or dead”. There is apparently no fourth option.

They have been busy in Germany. Recently they put up fences in the streets in Hamburg, to separate the Bad Unvaxxed from the Good Vaxxed at the Christmas markets. Outdoors. Perhaps they will also provide the Good people with rocks to throw across those fences. The mood certainly seems ripe. A cartoon recently published in the mainstream, high-circulation newspaper Frankfürter Allgemeine Zeitung featured a man sitting on his sofa playing a first-person shooter game in which the targets were unvaccinated people. The caption described it as “a big hit under the Christmas tree.”

Not that Germans or Austrians have any monopoly on the current march towards authoritarianism in the name of public health. It is entirely globalised. The opinion recently expressed by Pulitzer Prize-winning American art critic Jerry Saltz to his half a million Twitter followers was typical of a new form of class hatred that is somehow acceptable in the age of cancellations and hyper-sensitivity. “My latest Covid thought is ‘Let her rip:’”, he wrote. “Meaning, we who are lucky enough to be triple & double vaxed are pretty protected. Let the rest die. I know they pose a danger to us all. But we are more than 97% protected from them. If they want to die, I say let them die. Freedom.”

Across Europe and the wider world, the picture is the same. Internment. Mandatory medication. Segregation of whole sections of society. Mass sackings. A drumbeat media consensus. The systematic censoring of dissent. The deliberate creation of a climate of fear and suspicion. The deepening demonisation of the “unvaxxed”. Something terrible is rising around us, and we are only just waking up to it.

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Inside the Austrian lockdown

By Freddie Sayers

I am watching all this from Ireland, the country which has the highest adult vaccination rate in Western Europe, at over 94% of the population. Here, cases are accelerating so fast that we were all told recently to work from home, and another lockdown is widely feared. New restrictions for children, who are least at risk from Covid, are being proposed, and a midnight curfew has recently been imposed on pubs and nightclubs. This is odd, as only vaccinated people have been allowed into them since the summer, with the scan of a smartphone-enabled QR code being the only way to access much of society.

In an honest society, all of this would have been subject to robust public debate. We would have seen scientists of all opinions openly debating on TV and radio and in the press; views of all kinds aired on social media without fear of censorship; journalists properly investigating reports of both vaccine successes and vaccine dangers; serious explorations of alternative treatments; public debates about the balance between civil liberties and public health, and what “public health” even means.

But we have not seen this and we will not see it, for debate, like dissent, is out of fashion. The media here has not asked a critical question of anyone in authority for at least 18 months. Google’s algorithms are busy burying inconvenient data, while the social media channels from which most people receive their worldview are removing or suppressing critical opinions, even if they come from virologists or editors of the British Medical Journal.

What could possibly justify this? One answer might be: the combination of a terrible pandemic which killed or maimed large percentages of those it infected, and the existence of a safe and reliable medicine which was proven to prevent its spread. This, of course, is what we are said to be living through. This is the Narrative.

But it is clear enough by now that the Narrative is not true. Covid-19 is certainly a nasty illness which should be taken seriously, especially by those who are especially vulnerable to it. For the elderly and infirm especially, it can be a serious risk. But it is not dangerous enough — if anything could be — to justify the frightening atmosphere which is rising across the world. The authoritarian response to the virus has become the go-to solution for governments everywhere, and the climate of fear in society as a whole has often meant enthusiastic support for such a response. As the vaccines fail to end the pandemic, new variants continue to arise and every promise of “unlocking” ends with the reimposition of restrictions, so the calls grow for more clampdowns, more segregation, more isolation and internment. With each call, a new roughness comes over the culture.

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By Matthew Crawford

This roughness is what leads to the persecution, abuse and scapegoating of anyone foolish enough to stick their head above the parapet and question the Narrative, and that in turn leads to more people walking away from those who promote it. The solidarity of the pandemic’s early days already feels like a century ago. Day by day, the combination of breakdown and clampdown eats like acid through the social fabric of a society already riven by a “culture war” that seeks enemies first and understanding very much later.

All of this has descended like a flock of birds on one single technology — “the vaccine” — on which all hopes and fears converge. But the divisions that have opened up in society about the Covid vaccines are not really about the vaccines at all: they are about what they symbolise. What it means to be “vaxxed” or “unvaxxed”, safe or dangerous, clean or dirty, sensible or irresponsible, compliant or independent: these are questions about what it means to be a good member of society, and what society even is, and they are detonating like depth charges beneath the surface of the culture.

In his fascinating Substack newsletter The Stoa, academic Peter Limberg proposes an analysis of the ongoing Covid wars. He identifies two positions on the virus and the reaction to it. Both are generalisations — plenty of people will cleave fully to neither — but broadly speaking, which you identify with will inform your view of who the Other is.

Limberg describes the first position — the Thesis — like this:

Lockdowns are needed to contain the virus, masks work and need to be mandated, vaccines are safe, people should take the vaccine to protect themselves and others, and vaccine passports will help open things up quicker and encourage those who are hesitant to get vaccinated.

The Thesis is the establishment position. It is held, in Limberg’s words, by “legacy media … NGOs, Universities, Western governments, and memetic tribes on the political Left.” In contrast, the opposing view — the Antithesis — is held by a ragtag of political dissidents of all stripes, from rightwingers to anarchists, motivated to cluster for different reasons around an alternative story:

Lockdowns are not needed, masks do not work, the safety and efficacy of the vaccines are being oversold, vaccine passports will not only fail but further segregate society, and in the near future we can expect Giradian scapegoating of the unvaccinated. In other words, we are positioned on the precipice of a slippery slope that leads towards increasingly draconian biopolitical control measures, the grip of which is unlikely to release even once the pandemic is over.

What we see around us now, as the Thesis visibly fails, is more and more people looking around for explanations and landing on versions of the Antithesis. As that happens, more of those who support the Thesis feel threatened and angry. The people questioning the Thesis, to them, are not thinking human beings wondering what is going on and not getting satisfactory answers. They are “conspiracy theorists” and “anti-vaxxers” and “far-Right actors”, whose views will lead to mass death.

In response to this intolerance, the more extreme elements of the Antithesis position dig in deeper, offering up intolerance of their own, condemning the “sheeple” who still cleave to the Narrative, and proposing alternative stories which range from convincing right up to frightening. Some of the worst home straight in on old enemies: ‘the Jews’, as ever, are a popular target. This in turn allows proponents of the Thesis to conveniently represent any opposition to their line as dangerous and worthy of censorship. Fear and suspicion reign. Neither tribe is talking to the other, and each assumes the worst of their opponents.

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Take these two positions, electrify them, pour them through the sieve of misery that is “social” media, and you have the current vaccine wars. The rage that swirls around the attitude to the Covid jab is a substitute for something else. Underneath the arguments about whether or not to take a vaccine glides something older, deeper, slower: something with all the time in the world. Some great spirit whose work is to use these fractured times to reveal to us all what we need to see: things hidden since the foundation of the modern world.

Covid is a revelation. It has lain bare splits in the social fabric that were always there but could be ignored in better times. It has revealed the compliance of the mainstream media, and the power of Silicon Valley to curate and control the public conversation. It has confirmed the sly dishonesty of political leaders, and their ultimate obeisance to corporate power. It has shown how ideology, on all sides, can mask itself with the pretend neutrality of “science”.

Most of all, it has revealed the authoritarian streak that lies beneath so many people, and which always emerges in fearful times. In the last month alone, I have watched media commentators calling for censorship of their political opponents, philosophy professors justifying mass internment, and human rights lobby groups remaining silent about “vaccine passports”. I have watched much of the political Left transition openly into the authoritarian movement it probably always was, and countless “liberals” campaigning against liberty. As freedom after freedom has been taken away, I have watched intellectual after intellectual justify it all.

I have learnt more about human nature in the past two years than in my preceding 47. I have learnt some things about myself too, and I don’t especially like them either. I have noticed my ongoing temptation to become a partisan: to judge and condemn those on the other side of the question, to find a tribe I can join. I have noticed my tendency to seek out only sources of information which confirm my beliefs.

Most of all, though, what the Covid apocalypse has revealed to me is that when people are frightened, they can be very easily controlled.

Of all the stories we are watching play out right now, this is the biggest one: the manipulation of public fear to impose unprecedented levels of control on populations. The ongoing nature of the Covid threat — the endless boosters, the endless variants — means there is no end in sight to this “new normal”. Like the War on Terror before it, the control and monitoring of citizens in the name of “public health”, the segregation of the virtuous vaxxed (or, any day now, boosted) from the antisocial unvaxxed, the internet-wide censorship of whatever Silicon Valley labels “disinformation”, and the widespread obedience of the once-mainstream press to an agreed story towards which they clumsily try to nudge their readers — none of this has any sell-by date.

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This is the story of the times. Across the world we are seeing an unprecedented claim to control staked by the forces of the state, in alliance with the forces of corporate capital, over your life and mine. All of it converges on the revealed symbol of our age: the smartphone-enabled QR code that has, with frightening speed and in near-silence, become the new passport to a full human life. As ever, our tools have turned on us.

The Covid vaccines, whatever their other virtues, have not prevented transmission of the virus, as governments have now publicly acknowledged. If they had, we would not be where we are. For this reason alone, there can be no justification for systems as divisive and anti-democratic as vaccine passports or lockdowns of the unvaccinated. If we were operating, as we pretend to be, from the ground of reason — if we really were “following the science” — then we would be dismantling these systems at this point. Instead we are moving deeper into them.

We are being herded into a future in which scanning a code to prove you are a safe and obedient member of society may become a permanent feature of life, as unquestioned as credit cards and driver’s licences. We are moving towards enforced mandatory vaccination of entire populations — including children — with potential prison sentences for those who refuse.

The Thesis, if left unchecked, leads straight to tyranny. But the danger of cleaving entirely to the Antithesis is a potential descent into paranoia. Both positions thrive on fear of the filthy Other, who must be destroyed with a barrage of claim and counter-claim, backed up by links to studies about ivermectin or vaccine side-effects.

Limberg puts his hope in the possibility of forging a Synthesis of the two positions. But in order to get there, he says, both sides must discover and inhabit the fears of the other: something which looks less likely by the day. As someone who began this pandemic journey cautiously cleaving to the Thesis, but who has tipped towards Antithesis as the Narrative has unspooled and the dishonesty of its proponents has become clear, I can explain my own fears easily enough.

In a short but momentous two years, we in the West, who have spent decades, if not centuries, lecturing the rest of the world about “freedom”, and sometimes trying to bomb them into accepting it, have abandoned ours without so much as a murmur, and begun enthusiastically scapegoating those who question this path. We who invented this thing called “liberalism” are now burying it, and building on the bare soil some technocratic state-corporate hybrid; a China-style social credit society, centralised, monitored, powered by algorithms, emphatically unnatural and unfree.

We are in a revolutionary moment. Societies are being transformed, with no public discussion and no consent, into a version of a Silicon Valley nerd’s wet dreams. Unless we can reach some form of synthesis soon — unless the sheeple can address the fears of the covidiots, and vice versa — then we risk being blinded to where the real power lies, and what is being constructed around us as we bicker and insult and pontificate.

Covid has been both revelation and accelerant. Now the direction of travel is increasingly clear. Unless we actively refuse it, our future looks like a QR code flickering across a human face forever.

Omicron has been detected — and may have first arisen — in Gauteng province, South Africa. There have only been a few hundred cases detected, so it’s hard to say much about it with any real certainty. But it appears to be more transmissible and there are concerns that immunity, whether from vaccination or prior infection, will be less effective against it. There have been, as I write, three cases detected in the UK, and there are real (and justified) fears that we are heading once again into a lockdown Christmas. 

But nonetheless, we have been very lucky.

We mustn’t forget that the virus is constantly mutating. Every time it copies itself, there is a chance that it will make some minor error. Most of those mutations either have no effect or make it less effective at spreading. But every so often one will improve it: perhaps make it harder for the immune system to see, or make the virus quicker at copying itself.

The other new variants, notably Alpha and Delta, had several mutations, but Omicron has dozens: around 50. And 10 of them are on the bits of the “spike” protein on the virus’s surface which bind with our cells — the “receptor binding domains”. Sir Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust and former member of SAGE, tells me that these are exactly the kind of mutations which virologists have been expecting and dreading: “It’s biologically plausible that they will drive higher transmission. They’ve been identified before as ones we should be really careful about.”

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So far, it doesn’t sound very lucky. But in one mutation, Omicron has been kind to us. Like Alpha before it, it has a particular mutation, 69-70del, two missing RNA letters in its genome — part of the “S gene” which codes for the spike protein. By happy chance, those missing letters are at one of three places that many PCR tests look at.

What it means is that if a PCR test comes back positive on two out of its three areas — if it has an “S-gene dropout” — then you can be pretty sure you’ve got one of the variants. It means that Alpha last year and now Omicron can be tracked pretty effectively, just with PCR testing: even without sequencing the genomes, you can see where these S-gene dropout results are happening and it’ll give you a good idea of how the variant is spreading.

“It’s a complete gift that the S-gene dropout hits this variant,” says Ewan Birney, the deputy director-general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. If it didn’t, we would have much less of an idea where Omicron is. (We’ve actually been lucky twice. If Delta hadn’t replaced Alpha, then the S-gene dropout wouldn’t have told us anything, because both the circulating variants would have had it.)

So far, so good. But is the new variant more transmissible and/or more able to bypass our immunity, whether from vaccines or infection? And is it more or less dangerous to people who catch it?

These are hard questions to answer, because at the moment, we only have data from South Africa, and South Africa’s population is tricky to compare with ours. It’s younger, for a start — the median South African is 26-years old, while the median Brit is 40. It’s also much less vaccinated: somewhere around 75% of Britons have been double-jabbed, while barely a quarter have in South Africa (which is, to my surprise, more to do with uptake than supply). It has also had far fewer confirmed cases per capita.

That said, we can make some guesses. When a new variant emerges, it’s difficult to tell whether it has spread because it is better at spreading, or because it happens to have arisen in a convenient place. Imagine a virus which happened to mutate into a new variant in someone who was about to go to a major conference. It might infect hundreds of people and show up all over the country, but it wouldn’t be because it was any more transmissible — it was just that it got lucky.

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With Omicron, this seems unlikely to be the case. Thanks to the S-gene dropout, we can see that it’s spreading faster than you’d expect. Farrar says that “there has been a clear upswing of transmission in Gauteng, which seems to be driven by the variant”. “It probably can outcompete Delta,” says Babak Javid, an immunology lab director at the University of California San Francisco, “although by how much is still up in the air.” 

Is that because it’s better at spreading in general, or because it can evade immunity? So far, we don’t have the data to say for sure. Soon, we’ll start to get results from laboratory studies, and later from epidemiological observations, but Rupert Beale, leader of the Cell Biology of Infection lab at the Crick Institute, thinks it’s “a few weeks before we get useful information, and the other side of Christmas before we know anything definitive”.

But on the plus side, antibodies aren’t the only part of our immune system. We also have T-cells, which are less easily fooled by mutations. To oversimplify, antibodies stop you getting infected in the first place, but T-cells stop you from getting very ill. So Javid and Birney think it is plausible that Omicron will spread quite easily among vaccinated and/or previously infected people, but will be less likely to kill them or make them severely ill.

There has also been speculation that Omicron is inherently less deadly to people with no pre-existing immunity. That’s not impossible, but everyone I spoke to said that any definitive conclusions are premature. “The speculation is extremely uninformed,” says Beale. “We just don’t know until it gets into a more vulnerable population, which sadly it seems it’s likely to. We can hope it’s less pathogenic, but it’s foolish to make that assumption.”

So it might be better at spreading, and able to escape our immunity to at least some degree; and while it’s theoretically possible it might be less deadly, that’s certainly not a proposition we want to put any weight on. The question is: what should we do, and are we facing a second bleak Covid winter?

The pandemic should have taught us that acting early is usually better than acting late, and that preparing for worst-case scenarios is important. It’s like chess, says Beale: “You play your moves in the most flexible order.” If we assume it’ll all be OK, we might be right, but if we’re wrong, we’ll end up with Omicron spreading all over the place. Whereas if we assume it’ll be pretty bad, we can always open up again later on.

I’ve seen a lot of people, some of them very sensible, suggesting that there’s no point closing borders to South Africa because variants will get through anyway, and that it’s just punishing countries for doing good surveillance. But I think they are wrong. 

Yes, the variant will get through, if it hasn’t already. Farrar points out that it was first identified on 11 November, and its sequence suggests that it had already been circulating for some time before then. “I think it may already be on every continent,” he says. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no point in trying to reduce its spread. “Border closures might buy you a little time.” Birney agrees: “Shutting the borders until we understand it, minimising the seeding events, is a good rational move.”

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It’s true that there’s a risk of punishing countries for responsible surveillance, but I don’t see what the alternative is — pretending that they don’t have lots of Omicron circulating? Perhaps the thing to do is also put restrictions on countries with poor surveillance.

Because “buying a little time” might be important. If nothing else, it gives us time to understand it: if Omicron is highly virulent and vaccine-resistant, then our best response will be rather different to what it would be if it isn’t. It also gives us a chance to get more boosters in arms and to stockpile antiviral drugs. 

All the same arguments apply to other non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as introducing vaccine passports or asking people to work from home if possible. But there are other things Britain can do, too. 

One thing is to hugely increase our vaccine manufacturing capacity — something which would be good for us and for the world. Rolling out children’s vaccines and booster jabs faster wouldn’t hurt. One scientist I spoke to suggested making antiviral meds available by post when people get a positive result: “They need to be given quickly to have a good effect, so you can’t rely on GP appointments. You need to link them to Track & Trace”. Cheaper, quicker PCR testing at airports would help.”

But while those measures are important, they’re not addressing the root of the issue. For Farrar, the emergence of Omicron is just another reminder that we need to vaccinate the world, not just the rich world. “There’s been political drift for months now, in terms of access to vaccines,” he said. “The rich world thought it was over, so they’ve been kicking it into the long grass.” Variants like Omicron will continue to arise until the world has a decent level of immunity.

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We’ve been lucky, with Omicron. But it may well still end up becoming the dominant strain, just as Delta did before it. If it doesn’t, then another one will come along. And it will be “incredibly disruptive”, says Farrar: “Everyone’s putting restrictions in.” Certainly, to avoid another lockdown Christmas, we need to act now.

But if we want to be sure we don’t have another one next year, we need to get this pandemic behind us — and that means billions more doses of vaccine, distributed around the world. We won’t always be so lucky.

For a year, beer, wine and spirits had been illegal throughout the United States. From a public health perspective, it seemed a reasonable enough measure. That alcohol was a dangerous substance was clear: disease, violence, poverty and crime were intimately bound up with it. Even now, despite its failure, it is known as the “noble experiment”. But was it right to prevent people from making drinks they not only enjoyed, but that also served important cultural and religious purposes? Not for the first time, Americans found themselves torn in a balance between freedom and security — nor for the last.

Until recently, prohibition remained the largest experiment in social engineering a democracy had ever undertaken. And then, in early 2020, a new virus began to spread from China. Faced with this threat, the world’s governments responded by closing schools, banning people from meeting, forcing entrepreneurs to shut their businesses and making ordinary people wear face masks. Like prohibition, this experiment provoked a debate. In all the democracies of the world, freedom was weighed against what was perceived as security; individual rights versus what was considered best for public health.

Few now remember that for most of 2020, the word “experiment” had negative connotations. That was what Swedes were accused of conducting when we — unlike the rest of the world — maintained some semblance of normality. The citizens of this country generally didn’t have to wear face masks; young children continued going to school; leisure activities were largely allowed to continue unhindered.

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This experiment was judged early on as “a disaster” (Time magazine), a “the world’s cautionary tale” (New York Times), “deadly folly” (the Guardian). In Germany, Focus magazine described the policy as “sloppiness”; Italy’s La Repubblica concluded that the “Nordic model country” had made a dangerous mistake. But these countries — all countries — were also conducting an experiment, in that they were testing unprecedented measures to prevent the spread of a virus. Sweden simply chose one path, the rest of Europe another.

The hypothesis of the outside world was that Sweden’s freedom would be costly. The absence of restrictions, open schools, reliance on recommendations instead of mandates and police enforcement would result in higher deaths than other countries. Meanwhile, the lack of freedom endured by the citizens of other countries would “save lives.”

Many Swedes were persuaded by this hypothesis. “Shut down Sweden to protect the country,” wrote Peter Wolodarski, perhaps the country’s most powerful journalist. Renowned infectious diseases experts, microbiologists and epidemiologists from all over the country warned of the consequences of the government’s policy. Researchers from Uppsala University, the Karolinska Institute and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm produced a model powered by supercomputers that predicted 96,000 Swedes would die before the summer of 2020.

At this stage, it was not unreasonable to conclude that Sweden would pay a high price for its freedom. Throughout the spring of 2020, Sweden’s death toll per capita was higher than most other countries.

But the experiment didn’t end there. During the year that followed, the virus continued to ravage the world and, one by one, the death tolls in countries that had locked down began to surpass Sweden’s. Britain, the US, France, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Belgium — countries that had variously shut down playgrounds, forced their children to wear facemasks, closed schools, fined citizens for hanging out on the beach and guarded parks with drones — have all been hit worse than Sweden. At the time of writing, more than 50 countries have a higher death rate. If you measure excess mortality for the whole of 2020, Sweden (according to Eurostat) will end up in 21st place out of 31 European countries. If Sweden was a part of the US, its death rate would rank number 43 of the 50 states.

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This fact is shockingly underreported. Consider the sheer number of articles and TV segments devoted to Sweden’s foolishly liberal attitude to the pandemic last year — and the daily reference to figures that are forgotten today. Suddenly, it is as if Sweden doesn’t exist. When the Wall Street Journal recently published a report from Portugal, it described how the country “offered a glimpse” of what it would be like to live with the virus. This new normal involved, among other things, vaccine passports and face masks at large events like football matches. Nowhere in the report was it mentioned that in Sweden you can go to football matches without wearing a facemask, or that Sweden — with a smaller proportion of Covid deaths over the course of the pandemic — had ended virtually all restrictions. Sweden has been living with the virus for some time.

The WSJ is far from alone in its selective reporting. The New York Times, Guardian, BBC, The Times, all cheerleaders for lockdowns, can’t fathom casting doubt on their efficacy.

And those who’ve followed Sweden’s example have also come in for a lot of criticism. When the state of Florida — more than a year ago and strongly inspired by Sweden — removed most of its restrictions and allowed schools, restaurant and leisure parks to reopen, the judgement from the American media was swift. The state’s Republican governor was predicted to “lead his state to the morgue” (The New Republic). The media was outraged by images of Floridians swimming and sunbathing at the beach.

DeSantis’s counterpart in New York, the embattled Democrat Andrew Cuomo, on the other hand, was offered a book deal for his “Leadership lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic”. A few months ago, he was forced to resign after harassing a dozen women. But the result of his “leadership lesson” lives on: 0.29% of his state’s residents died of Covid-19. The equivalent figure for Florida — the state that not only allowed the most freedom, but also has the second highest proportion of pensioners in the country — is 0.27%.

Once again, an underreported fact.

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From a human perspective, it is easy to understand the reluctance to face these numbers. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that millions of people have been deprived of their freedom, and millions of children have had their education gravely damaged, for little demonstrable gain. Who wants to admit that they were complicit in this? But what one American judge called the “laboratories of democracy” have conducted their experiment — and the result is increasingly clear.

Exactly why it turned out this way is harder to explain, but perhaps the “noble experiment” of the 1920s in the US can offer some clues. Prohibition didn’t win because the freedom argument prevailed. Nor was it because the substance itself had become any less harmful to people’s health. The reason for the eventual demise of the alcohol ban was that it simply didn’t work. No matter what the law said, Americans didn’t stop drinking alcohol. It simply moved from bars to “speakeasies”. People learned to brew their own spirits or smuggle it in from Canada. And the American mafia had a field day.

The mistake the American authorities made was to underestimate the complexity of society. Just because they banned alcohol did not mean that alcohol disappeared. People’s drives, desires and behaviours were impossible to predict or fit into a plan. A hundred years later, a new set of authorities made the same mistake. Closing schools didn’t stop children meeting in other settings; when life was extinguished in cities, many fled them, spreading the infection to new places; the authorities urged their citizens to buy food online, without thinking about who would transport the goods from home to home.

If the politicians had been honest with themselves, they might have foreseen what would happen. For just as American politicians were constantly caught drinking alcohol during the prohibition, their successors were caught 100 years later breaking precisely the restrictions they had imposed on everyone else. The mayors of New York and Chicago, the British government’s top advisor, the Dutch Minister of Justice, the EU Trade Commissioner, the Governor of California all broke their own rules.

It isn’t easy to control other people’s lives. It isn’t easy to dictate desirable behaviours in a population via centralised command. These are lessons that many dictators have learned. During the Covid pandemic, many democracies have learned it too. The lesson has perhaps not yet sunk in, but hopefully it will eventually. Then perhaps it will be another 100 years before we make the same mistake again.

This is an edited translation of an article that first appeared in Sydsvenskan.

And then, in 1906, an earthquake destroyed the fragile city. Buildings toppled. Broken gas pipes and fallen powerlines started fires. The authorities tried in vain to create firebreaks, resorting to dynamiting whole blocks of houses, but there was no stopping the fires that burned for another four days. More than 80% of the city’s buildings were destroyed. At least 3,000 people were killed, and the majority of survivors were displaced from their homes.

It is what followed the disaster, though, that is truly fascinating. San Francisco transformed. It went from a city renowned for cut-throat competition, race riots and brothels to the site of an extraordinary upsurge of public-spiritedness. Residents who survived built impromptu health clinics and makeshift shelters.

A beautician, Anna Amelia Holshouser, recalled how she and others stitched blankets and sheets together to make a tent for children, and then set up a soup kitchen, feeding as many strangers as they could out of a few unbroken plates and tin cans. All across the wrecked landscape, groups of survivors banded together to create places of safety and mutual aid. Rebecca Solnit describes the small-scale initiatives on each rubble-strewn street of San Francisco as “little utopias” — that is, idealistic micro-societies where people lived as much for others as for themselves, spontaneously rejecting the dominant narrative of individualism.

What occurred in San Francisco was a rare thing, but it had happened before and it would happen again. Over and over throughout history, idealistic, cooperative communities have sprouted up in the wake of disasters.

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There are few examples as clear as the communities that followed the First World War, less than a decade after the earthquake in San Francisco. On a single day in the war — 22 August 1914 — the French army lost 27,000 men: half as many soldiers dead as the United States would later lose in the entire Vietnam War. In addition to ten million lives lost over the course of the conflict there was the wider damage: the uncounted millions scarred in body and mind; the disorienting sense of an entire social order destroyed.

People reeled under the compound effect of war and an influenza pandemic — robbed of their young, their hopes destroyed, uncertain of what the future held. But amid the destruction arose an impulse that was optimistic, energetic and humanitarian.

As in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, small groups of men and women began to rebuild, starting experimental settlements, renouncing old ways of living and trying to create new ones. Many people around the world believed the old social order was to blame for the Great War: the preoccupation with capitalist gain and nationalistic competition. Their response was to lead lives built around philosophies of non-materialistic mutual aid. In Germany, coteries of students and intellectuals took to the country to live collectively and farm cooperatively. In Japan, so many idealistic settlements were started that the conservative press reported anxiously on a “new village craze”. These post-war groups, though drastically different in style and structure, all had shades of the resilient, compassionate and communally-minded action that defined the days after the earthquake in San Francisco.

What can we learn from these reactions to disaster? Perhaps simply that adversity itself can prompt what is good in mankind — the urge to redraft the lines along which our societies are built for the better; a turn to co-operative social striving that would otherwise never have manifested.

And yet few utopias last long. In San Francisco, it was just a matter of days before thousands of soldiers were “restoring order” in the city — which included shooting those who were trying to collect food for the needy. New modes of living rarely spark large-scale social transformations, and all too often the status quo resumes.

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But short-lived though most utopian communities are, they are connected in a beneficial way to the existing social order. They are in what German sociologist Karl Mannheim called “dialectical tension” with it: offering a reconfigured version of the outside world, expanding people’s sense of social possibilities, while at the same time being shaped by the mainstream’s needs. Even the communities that disintegrate quickly leave traces behind them, some of which are absorbed into the dominant social structures. And their examples gesture towards the fundamental idealism and resiliency in the human spirit, and the easily forgotten truth that it is always possible to recast the way we live.

We’re passing through another disaster now. And though the defining nature of this pandemic has been that people have been forced to live apart, it has nonetheless sparked impressive examples of idealistic activity, of cooperation and social action. Drivers in Wuhan created a volunteer car fleet to transport medical workers to hospitals when public transport shut down; young people in India mobilised to provide aid packages for those without savings; experts created the open-source library “Coronavirus Tech Handbook”, pooling knowledge on technologies and organisational methods for fighting the pandemic.

Climate change is a slower-moving crisis. Like the First World War, it has sparked in many a sense of the failure of the underlying systems of society and governance, which seem to be unable or unwilling to cope and change. Collectives experimenting with low-impact modes of communal living — ecotopias, as some of them call themselves — are proliferating.

At Old Hall Community in Suffolk, a group of 50 share a manor house, farming, cooking communally and keeping their carbon footprint as near as possible to net zero. In the mountains of Asturias in northern Spain, sixty Spanish, French, Danish and German women and men live in the remote commune of Matavenero, where they grow their own food, build their own houses and consume as little as they can. There are larger initiatives, including the community of Toyosato in Japan, where several hundred participants aim to demonstrate a fulfilling life built on sustainable farming, cooperation and minimal possessions. This settlement is one of more than 70 low-impact communities that form the Yamagishi movement, which stretches to Australia, Brazil, Switzerland and the United States.

These contemporary utopias are not a replacement for long-sighted national and international legislation, or for the much-needed regulation of corporate actors. In many ways they may be less effective than change-oriented activists such as Extinction Rebellion. But ecotopians put their money where their mouths are. They live in the way they think we all ought to live.

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There seems to be a time limit on utopian communities. When the disasters that inspired them are forgotten, they generally collapse, or are absorbed back into the old order with its attendant oppressions and injustices. Sometimes, they mitigate that old order, demonstrating practices that can help make society a little better, a little more just. But climate change falls outside of this pattern. We are not likely to live to see the end of this global disaster. And if we insist on holding fast to the old order, to the dominant ideologies of hyper-individualism and materialism, the crisis will only deepen.

Utopian living, at its best, creates an opening in the fabric of society, allowing us to see how fragile the habits and structures which seem immutable in day-to-day life really are. “While the crisis lasted, people loved each other,” wrote the young reformer Dorothy Day of the San Francisco earthquake, having watched her mother give away her clothes to survivors. We haven’t quite reached the moment of imaginative, communal rebuilding that people are capable of when faced with disaster. We must hope that this moment will arrive soon.

Judging by the stream of recent headlines, petitions and open letters, parents of 12 to 15-year-olds could soon be heading for a showdown over the “right to be vaccinated against Covid”. The UK’s Chief Medical Officers this week announced a plan to offer them jabs — despite the Government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation’s advice that the direct benefits for healthy children were too marginal.

And while parents will be required to give their consent for their child to be vaccinated, a child will be able to override their parents’ refusal providing he or she is deemed to have “enough intelligence, competence and understanding to fully appreciate what’s involved in their treatment” (otherwise known as being Gillick competent).

Covid-19 has always been a crisis in search of a culture war, and the response to this announcement has been no exception. When such luminaries as Gillian McKeith and Laurence Fox, and groups with titles such as Family Defence League and Lawyers for Liberty, start advising parental resistance, you know it’s about more than the scientific specifics of just one jab. Suddenly it is about personal freedom, the rejection of state interference in family life and the principle that a parent should decide what is right for their child. It is about where you stand politically and how you want to be perceived.

I’ll be honest: I do not want to be standing alongside Laurence Fox. I know which “side” of this debate I am meant to be on — which one suits both my political persuasions and my parenting style. And it is that, more than any in-depth medical knowledge, which tempts me to declare myself fine with my own children overriding my consent (were it not for the fact that this in itself constitutes a form of giving consent — the eternal paradox of liberal parenting).

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I find the idea of a child ending up in mediation with their own parents over the right to be vaccinated not just unlikely, but bizarre (the idea of slammed doors, mealtime sulks, plaintive cries of “but EVERYONE else has had one!”). Yet for others, the anxiety is real, with schools being inundated with letters from parents fearful that vaccinations will take place behind their backs.

Perhaps I’m unusual, but ever since I was allowed — just allowed! — to take my firstborn home from the hospital, I’ve been sceptical about the idea that parents know best.

Parental decisions are informed not just by love, but politics. We know this, though we tend to tell ourselves it is those other parents — those of the opposing political tribe — who are getting it wrong. This inconsistency is particularly glaring in current debates on the treatment of young people with gender dysphoria. There are parents who support social transition, the prescription of puberty blockers and/or the use of binders, and parents who don’t — with both sides insisting they are motivated by an understanding of their child inaccessible to anyone else. In accounts of raising trans children, or opposing a child’s desire to transition, “I know what’s best for my child” merges with “any loving parent in my position would make the same choice” (or, at the sharp end, “any parent who would not make the same choice obviously wants their child dead”).

It is uncomfortable to admit that your love, and what is in the “best interests of the child”, is tainted by your own background, self-image, friendship groups and even personal traumas. Yet I know mine is, even when I think I’m right. Indeed, it is by watching the Covid vaccination debate play out that I’ve felt, more than ever, how much more attractive it is to cling to our slogans rather than admit how little we know.

I have my own self-defeating list of things that I, as a parent, should and should not be allowed to do. Not allowed: smacking children; restricting access to contraception and abortion (providing safeguarding checks are made); vetoing access to good sex education (I decide what “good” is). Allowed: vetoing access to dodgy sex education (I decide what “dodgy” is); intervening where a treatment constitutes self-harm (I decide what “self-harm” is).

I know this is provisional and shaky, riven with qualifications, making the bodies of my children (and yours) a testing ground for my politics. I do think there are areas — such as the administration of physical punishment, or the use of breast binders — where it is possible to make a more objective case for harm being done, but the template of “parents’ rights” is unhelpful. With the proposed Covid vaccinations, the situation is different still; the play-off is not between potential losses and gains for one’s own child, but potential gains for other people, perhaps even yourself.

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Here we have an example where the primary beneficiaries of a treatment may not be — indeed, most probably are not — those receiving it. As a result, the simplistic concept of individuals, or their parents, knowing what’s best for them falls apart. Writing in The Independent, Victoria Richards argues in favour of “competent” children making the final decision on vaccination using the principle of “knowing best”:

“Some children under the age of 15 will be deemed “Gilick competent”, some won’t… Parents or carers know their children best — so chances are, you know which camp your child would likely fall into. If you’re a parent who’s vaccine-hesitant, I can understand why you might feel upset – even angry — about such a scenario. But what I really feel is that we should trust our kids; many of whom are mature, intelligent and information-savvy well before the age of 12.”

I think my children are mature, intelligent and information-savvy; the trouble is, I don’t think the debate over having a Covid jab is a test of these qualities. This is a complex situation, hijacked by narratives about state control, science and freedom. It is also one in which moral pressure is being exerted on children, one that might come from schools, but which could also come from parents who want their children to be vaccinated. Coercing children — however subtly — to do something with their bodies which isn’t primarily for their benefit is questionable. But so, too, is making that body the site for spurious, abstract arguments about liberty and parental infallibility. Neither side is coming off well.

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Richards goes on to invoke the principle of “my body, my choice”: “We can’t very well teach our children that they have the right to say “no” to unwanted physical contact one minute, and then demand they kiss an aged aunt the next… And if we are teaching our kids that their bodies (rightly) belong to them, then that should go for whatever it is they decide about the vaccine, too.”

But this is a reversal of our usual message regarding consent, because the focus is on the right to say “yes”, not “no”. There’s something telling in the way that liberal leanings push us towards making the dominant message “you have the right to override your parents if they say no”, rather than “you have the right to override them if they say yes”. It smacks — just a little — of an uncomfortable political division on consent, whereby some of us only want to focus on the giving rather than the withholding. For all the accusations of illiberal moral panic one might throw at those raising alarm about the vaccine, “my body, my choice” is a slogan that would seem to me to apply better to the children saying no for themselves. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself veering, ever so slightly, Laurence Fox-wards.

I am not going to fight with my children over the vaccine; they want to have one and I will not stop them. But there are bigger questions to ask, not just about what influence parents should have, but what we are using our children for. Children have been asked to make significant, necessary sacrifices for adults; it is not necessary to use them to fight our own culture wars.

By contrast, on Sunday I spent eight hours in a central London bar playing nerdy wargames in a tournament. When you’re surrounded by about 30 increasingly stressed men, on a warm day in a smallish, un-air-conditioned room, you become intensely aware of the limits of social distancing. I’ll find out whether I caught Covid soon enough, but the fact that it was possible to do it shows how different life is now.

There’s something worth noting, though. The current seven-day rolling average of deaths is at about 120. For context, that’s about what it was in the middle of October last year, two weeks before we went into that second lockdown. It’s about eight times what it was this time last year. As this thread from the Bristol University mathematician Oliver Johnson points out, in September 2020 the prediction that we would reach 200 deaths a day in November was met with horror and, in some cases, disbelief. But at the present rate of growth, we’ll be at 200 a day by November again, and no one seems to be all that concerned. 

Crucially, too, at that rate of growth we could end up at 2,000 hospitalisations a day — about half the January 2021 peak. If that were to happen, we probably won’t see hospitals running out of oxygen, like we did during the first two waves. But we might see it getting harder to access routine care. I spoke to one ophthalmologist earlier this year, and he said that quite a few patients suffered avoidable, but irreversible, sight loss because the sheer weight of Covid cases meant their treatment had to be delayed. That’s a microcosm of the health service in general: for comparison, 2017/18, the worst winter for excess deaths in the last half-century, saw a peak of about 1,000 hospitalisations and about 50 deaths a day, and that led to tens of thousands of hospital appointments being cancelled.

Maybe I’m misremembering, but my sense is that we were a lot more anxious last year than we are now. I don’t think there were many wargaming tournaments taking place, for one thing. Thousands of people cheered Emma Raducanu on as she won the US Open at the weekend; in 2020, it was played in front of empty stadiums.

We’re heading into winter again, and things will probably get worse — Boris Johnson is announcing plans for the coming months today — yet there remains a relatively carefree air. So why aren’t we more worried? And should we be?

There’s one obvious reason why we’re not all freaking out, and that is that we’re tired and bored and aren’t really paying attention. The news isn’t really reporting the numbers any more. 

But there are also real differences between now and last year,  mainly driven by immunity, particularly vaccines. Adam Kucharski, a mathematical epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told me that while “normalisation” has been part of it — “numbers that were massive don’t feel so massive” — there are also other things at work.

Some of it is pretty obvious. “The pool of susceptibility is very different,” he says. At the start of the pandemic, and in the second wave, there was the potential for a huge amount of devastation — “hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of hospitalisations”. We “hit the pause button” with lockdowns and other restrictions, but that was just pushing them into the future; the potential was still there.

Now, that pool of susceptibility is much smaller. Around 90% of all over-16s in the UK are vaccinated, and about seven million people have had Covid. Those people are much less likely to die than they were a year ago. Even if we completely let Covid rip through the population, it couldn’t do as much damage. 

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This is because the vaccines work, really quite well. If you look at how deaths are distributed (p33), around 16% of Covid fatalities among the over-80s are in not-fully-vaccinated people, despite around 95% of that age group being vaccinated: having the vaccine makes you much less likely to get very ill. 

Also, the shape of the curve is very different this time around. We’re at 120 deaths a day, but the growth rate is about 7% a week. There’s this neat trick for working out compound growth: if you divide 70 by the percentage weekly growth, you get the (rough) doubling time. So it will take about 10 weeks for deaths to double. By comparison, deaths were going up 50% a week for periods in autumn and winter, doubling about every 10 days. 

That’s, again, because of vaccinations. We’re living amazingly open lives at the moment — bars and theatres open, schools open, masks not compulsory — but the numbers of cases, and hospitalisations, and deaths, have crept up rather than shot up. “It’s been at a plateau for a long time,” says Kucharski. “Last year it was a firehose; you start to open up and cases go up.” Vaccines work against infection as well, so even though we’re pretty much wide open, vaccination is keeping growth slow.

After a few months of this, we now have a sense of what living with Covid feels like. Before, there weren’t “flat” periods. Either Covid numbers were going up, as they were in spring 2020 and autumn and winter, or we’d locked down and they were declining again. There was never stability. Now, even in our quite open society, even with full football stadiums and shops, numbers are going up only slowly, because we’re less likely to get infected and less likely to get ill if we do.

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The question, of course, is what to do next. Because while the numbers may be rising slowly, they are still going up. 

Maybe that doesn’t matter and we don’t need to stop them. “The optimistic reading is that we now have so much immunity that it’ll peak on its own,” says Oliver Johnson. And there are hints that case numbers have begun to come down. But if it doesn’t, if it carries on as it is, then we’ll have 250 or so deaths a day by the middle of November, and the NHS under severe pressure. 

The three things we should have learnt about Covid by now are, one, that it is quite hard to predict but that looking at percentage growth rates and extrapolating them into the future is a good start; two, that you need to prepare for the tail risks; and three, that doing things earlier rather than later is often a good idea.

Luckily, things are still moving relatively slowly. “If it’s a car crash,” says Johnson, “it’s a very very slow-motion car crash. There are opportunities to turn it around.” 

And we probably won’t need the stringent restrictions we used in the last two waves to turn it around, because the immunity in the population has made it harder for the disease to spread. “We have different levers we can pull now,” says Kucharski. “We can keep testing, we can use vaccine certification, we can reintroduce masks or ask people to work from home.” Given the slow growth, a combination of things like those — and vaccinations for the under-16s, announced this week, and booster jabs for the elderly, which are expected to be announced soon – might be enough to slow the growth to zero, to a truly flat epidemic.

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But whatever we do, we’ll probably need to do it sooner rather than later: the Government’s bloody silly “irreversible” comment notwithstanding, introducing less stringent measures now could avoid us having to do more stringent ones later. “If hospitalisations creep up and creep up,” says Kucharski, “then if we tighten up, it could leave us with a flat epidemic at a higher plateau.” If the numbers have already doubled once or twice from where they are, that “would not leave us somewhere where we want the NHS to be over the winter”. The growth has been slower than it was, but in absolute terms, we are at a much higher level than we were this time last year, meaning that we have “less wiggle room” ahead of the winter surge in pressure on the NHS. 

Going out to restaurants, meeting people, sending my kids to school or to their gymnastics class and football — all that stuff of life is great and important. I want to have as much of it as possible over the winter. So we need to start talking about some relatively minor adjustments – stuff like bringing back masks in shops, encouraging working from home where possible, backing proper vaccination certificates. I prefer the world where I can play silly nerdy games in sweaty rooms, even if I lose all my games and come dead last, to the world where I sit on a park bench in the cold for two birthdays in a row.

This research, carried out in labs that did not have maximum level of biosafety, was increasing the infectivity of laboratory-created diseases by constructing chimeric coronaviruses — despite strong denial of such practices by the key Chinese scientists. And the bio-engineering was being funded by United States taxpayers — channelled through a charity run by a British scientist — despite similar denials from America’s most senior public health officials that they supported such science fiction activities in Chinese labs.

The details have been confirmed by the latest batch of documents emerging under US freedom of information rules — which unlike in Britain, actually assist attempts to break through walls of official obfuscation. The Intercept obtained 900 pages of documents detailing two research grants in 2014 and 2019 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to EcoHealth Alliance. This is the charity headed by Peter Daszak, the controversial Briton who led efforts to squash “conspiracy theories” about a possible lab incident after spending years hunting viruses with Shi Zhengli, the now-famous “Batwoman” expert at Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Some of these grant details have emerged previously — but these documents include the original proposals along with project updates, so significantly flesh out what we knew. They highlight how US funding bodies outsourced risky gain-of-function research to China, even over a three-year period between 2014 and 2017 when it was banned in their own nation. They also show, with new clarity, the kind of work taking place in secretive Wuhan labs. These disclosures fuel the mystery over the pandemic origins, while also sparking fresh concerns over top scientists in both China and the West who sought to suppress inquiries into the lab leak hypothesis.

A $3.1m grant, according to the documents, was awarded to understand “the risk of bat coronavirus emergence” through screening thousands of samples collected from the nocturnal creatures. This included a chunk of funding worth $599,000 for WIV. Bear in mind that three months ago, Shi, director of its Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases, angrily protested over the world “pouring filth on an innocent scientist” when emphatically refuting that they carried out gain-of-function work. “My lab has never conducted or co-operated in conducting GOF experiments that enhance the virulence of viruses” she told the New York Times.

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According to NIH “the term gain-of-function research describes a type of research that modifies a biological agent so that it confers new or enhanced activity to that agent”. Analysis of these papers show US funds supported construction of new chimeric Sars-related coronaviruses, which combined a spike gene from one with genetic material from another — and then showed the resulting creation could infect human cells and mice engineered to display human-type receptors on their cells.

One new virus had increased pathogenicity over the original virus and three new viruses increased viral load in lung tissues up to ten thousandfold, which is most definitely “enhanced activity.” As scientists pointed out to me, these results demonstrated increased pathogenicity of SARSr-CoVs with different spike proteins in humanised mouse models. And similar construction work was proposed to be done with another type of deadly pathogen — the Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus, which first flared up in Jordan nine years ago after spilling over from camels and has since cropped up in 27 countries, causing 858 deaths.

So yet again it seems Shi — probably under intense pressure from the Communist regime — has been manipulating not just bat viruses but the truth over her lab’s activities. Just like when she claimed a database containing 22,000 virus sequences and samples was taken offline due to hacking in the pandemic when it disappeared on September 12, 2019 — several weeks before infections emerged in Wuhan and months before global attention turned on her lab. Or when the name of the most closely-related virus to Sars-CoV-2 — the strain of virus that causes Covid-19 — was changed in a key scientific paper, thus masking ties to three miners who died in 2012 from a strange respiratory condition while clearing out a copper mine in southern China.

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Yet she is not the only key player in this drama telling porkies. Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and presidential adviser, insisted earlier this year that his country “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology”. His stance led to a furious clash in Congress with Senator Rand Paul, who gleefully tweeted after The Intercept published its article on the papers: “Surprise surprise – Fauci lied again. And I was right about his agency funding novel coronavirus research at Wuhan.”

Paul was backed by Richard Ebright, the bio-security expert and professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, who has long been a fierce critic of such work since he argues that the risks of creating new diseases in laboratories vastly outweigh any potential benefits. “The documents make it clear that assertions by Anthony Fauci and the NIH Director, Francis Collins that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful,” he said.

There are many fascinating nuggets in these papers such as discussion  of isolating coronaviruses using “transformed bat cell lines” from nine different species. “We have used these for virus isolation, infection assays and receptor molecule gene cloning.” Monali Rahalkar, an Indian microbiologist, said it was clear after combing through the details how such collaborative research could lead to something such as Sars-Cov-2. “And these are just two projects,” she said. “There were other projects and additionally the ones going on in China sponsored by their government.”

Buried in the documents are two more intriguing details. First, the experimental work creating mutant chimeric coronaviruses was carried out at WIV’s biosafety level 2 lab and then the work analysing them in humanised mice performed at the biosafety level 3 Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment, not at the new maximum level 4 WIV lab built with French assistance. The cluster of labs at the university hospital, incidentally, includes a breeding centre that created at least 1,000 types of genetically engineered animals from mice to monkeys. So this means the details in the papers accord with a previous statement by Shi that their coronavirus research is “conducted in BSL-2 or BSL-3 laboratories” — although a level 2 lab has, some say, barely higher safety standards than a dental clinic and certainly few safeguards against an lethal airborne virus.

Yet this is where the puzzle intensifies. For six months ago David Asher, who led State Department investigations into the origins, told a Washington seminar the first “known cluster that we’re aware of, of victims of what we believe to be Covid’ were three people who fell sick at a BSL 3 lab within a week of each other.

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“There is a possibility it was influenza,” he said. “But I’m very doubtful that three people in highly protected circumstances in a level three laboratory working on coronaviruses would all get sick with influenza that put them in a hospital or in severe conditions all in the same week, and it didn’t have anything with the coronavirus. That’s highly hard to believe. From that point forward, it certainly seemed to have started to spread within their community.”

Second, while Daszak has been condemning supposed conspiracy theories and defending his friends in China with whom he has collected thousands of samples, his own charity was pointing out the major risk of accidental infection faced by researchers when collecting such specimens in a project he led. “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled. There is also some risk of exposure to pathogens …while handling bats, civets, rodents or other animals, their blood samples or their excreta.”

It is, at last, largely accepted that there are two plausible theories behind this public health catastrophe, so perhaps these revelations have more political than scientific consequence. Even Peter Ben Embarek, the Danish food scientist who led the dismal World Health Organisation study trip to Wuhan earlier this year, recently admitted the possibility that a field incident sparked the pandemic was “a likely hypothesis”.

He told a documentary there might have been “human error” somewhere but this could not be admitted inside China’s repressive autocracy. “The whole system focuses a lot on being infallible, and everything must be perfect. Somebody could also wish to hide something. Who knows?” The engima has not been cracked but these are small steps forward in the search for the pandemic origins.

Thousands of Australian citizens remain stranded abroad, unable to return due to strict caps on spots in hotel quarantine, which are set by state governments. Frequent domestic border closures — also decided by state governments — have effectively fragmented Australia into eight separate countries. Last month, Australians were treated to the surreal spectacle of the Australian Defence Force patrolling the border between Queensland and New South Wales.

Across the country, citizens have discovered that reserve powers are largely the prerogative of state governments, and are being exercised in ways that routinely exclude other states’ residents, as if they were foreign nationals. For example, Western Australia now requires that people living in New South Wales have at least one shot of the Covid vaccine to enter the state. In one of the most callous examples of exclusionary state politics in practice, last year the Queensland government denied a 14-year-old double-lung transplant patient from NSW access to his specialist doctor, declaring that Queensland hospitals were for Queenslanders.

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Indeed, throughout the pandemic, it seems that states’ rights have trumped citizens’ rights — while at the same time reducing federal government to a feckless bystander.

How quickly things change. Few would have predicted that the Australian federation would suffer from such deep fragmentation before the pandemic. After all, the trend for decades had gone in exactly the opposite direction, towards greater centralisation of power at the federal level. Australia’s federalism was long viewed by political scientists as one of the world’s most “vertically imbalanced”; the Commonwealth has controlled around 80% of tax revenue since World War II, making Australia’s states reliant on federal transfers for half their budgets.

Federal governments used this leverage to introduce greater controls over how the states spend their money, by introducing a host of national schemes that promised funding to the states which agreed to undertake reforms. In some cases, such as in the National Disability Insurance Scheme initiated in 2013, states were relieved of their responsibility for disability care altogether, in favour of private and non-profit service-providers.

But when the pandemic struck in March 2020, state governments moved swiftly into the driver’s seat. Harnessing emergency powers few realised they possessed, they imposed society-wide lockdowns and closed internal borders. Although the constitution accords responsibility over quarantine and international borders to the federal government, lack of federal preparedness saw state governments assume full control over the hotel quarantine system, which was hastily established over one weekend. Since hotel quarantine capacity determines the number of weekly international arrivals into Australia, the states in effect have de facto control over international borders.

Initially, many were thrilled to see state governments taking strong action, especially as Prime Minister Scott Morrison was slow to act in the face of the pandemic. And premiers have been rewarded for this by remarkable levels of popular support, especially when they succeeded in keeping Covid out of their states. The Queensland Premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, and Western Australian Premier, Mark McGowan, were both easily returned to government in their respective state elections. In McGowan’s case, re-election was secured by a margin rarely observed in free and fair democratic polls.

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Morrison, meanwhile, despite initially enjoying high levels of public approval, has seen his popularity plunge to negative territory, as lockdowns and border closures sparked by the Delta variant have again handed the initiative to the states. Aware of the potential for incoherence and discord within the federation, he established a National Cabinet in March last year as a platform for federal and state leaders to coordinate policy directly. The National Cabinet was initially heralded a success, with the nationally coordinated lockdown of March-May 2020 eliminating community transmission in Australia. However, beneath the veneer of cooperation, there was squabbling and petty tribalism.

There were, for example, no national standards developed, so each state designed its own hotel quarantine system differently. When these systems failed, rather than learn from each other’s mistakes, states preferred to take pot shots at each other about whose Covid response was best.

The repercussions of this petulance soon became clear. In Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, poorly trained and precariously employed security guards caught Covid from returned travellers and then spread it in the community, sparking the state’s second wave last winter, resulting in more than 19,000 cases and 800 deaths, as well as a 112-day lockdown.

Victoria tried to redress these problems by establishing a centralised agency for managing hotel quarantine, but in June a leak from NSW sparked another wave of infections, which spread to other states and even New Zealand, resulting in more lockdowns. The outbreak was caused by an unvaccinated driver without the correct PPE transporting airline crew from the airport to the quarantine hotel. While NSW requires all drivers to be vaccinated and wear a mask, compliance and enforcement was left to the private transport companies. Once again, the failure to learn from best practice in other parts of the country had disastrous consequences.

As the pandemic has worn on, these skirmishes have erupted into open warfare, exacerbating the formidable challenge of developing and implementing an exit strategy from lockdown. Take the federal government’s recently proposed four-phase plan for reopening borders and ending restrictions. Based on Doherty Institute modelling, it anticipates reopening to be safe enough when 80% of the eligible adult population are fully vaccinated. Although initially approved in National Cabinet, some states almost immediately began to pull away.

The was mainly due to the emergence of two Australias. The first, which includes the two most populous states, New South Wales and Victoria, has suffered major outbreaks and long lockdowns. Consequently, they have abandoned “Zero Covid” strategies and accepted that reopening will involve some risk of the virus’ spread and mortalities.

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The second group, however, led by Queensland and WA, has so far managed to avoid major outbreaks thanks to border closures and snap lockdowns. Although indicating basic support for vaccination as a way out of isolation, their premiers have nonetheless repeatedly raised the threshold for reopening beyond the figures suggested in the Doherty model.

Palaszczuk, for example, recently argued that reopening should only occur after children younger than 12 were vaccinated. This is despite the fact that no country in the world has vaccinated under-12s, no vaccines are currently approved for this age group and their risk of serious illness is vanishingly low. Yet McGowan concurred, and wondered aloud why the federal government would want to “infect” WA. Although Palaszczuk backtracked a few days later, it is clear that reopening Australia, internally and internationally, will be fraught and challenged at every step, and finding a unified position among the federal and state governments will be difficult, if not impossible.

Australia’s federation is thus facing one of the biggest challenges in its history. Australia’s hodgepodge of state-based systems and responses, combined with endless acrimony and buck-passing, contrasts poorly with New Zealand’s more coherent “whole-of-government” approach, even though both countries are effectively following the same elimination strategy. If there’s one lesson for Australia in the past eighteen months, it’s surely that a greater consolidation of powers within the federal government is necessary for ensuring a unified, efficient and effective national response.

Ironically, however, it is likely this crisis will likely have the opposite effect, further entrenching the fragmentation of Australia’s federation, guaranteeing the same problems will recur in future crises. For state governments and their residents will not forget where reserve powers are truly located, and that they may be exercised with little regard for national agendas or citizenship rights.

In the absence of constitutional reform or some other change within Australian federalism, the temptation in future crises will always be for states to go it alone. So, what is the point of Australia? With 54% of WA residents in a recent survey declaring themselves “Western Australians” first rather than Australians, perhaps it is time we stop taking the answer for granted.

The clandestine involvement of Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance charity, was exposed in a batch of emails obtained by US Right To Know. This tenacious body has played an important role in opening up global debate on the pandemic’s origins, chipping away with freedom of information requests to draw out crumbs of evidence exposing attempts by leading scientific figures to shut down talk of any lab-related incident. And the more we discover from such efforts, the murkier the events early last year seem to appear.

The investigative body’s most recent cache of documents — published this week — involve emails obtained from Ohio State University virologist Shan-Lu Liu. They reveal a senior Chinese researcher was infected with Covid-19 in a leading Beijing virology laboratory soon after the Wuhan outbreak, highlighting the risks of inadvertent laboratory transmission. They also suggest that, according to Prof Liu, WIV “has many bat samples not yet worked out or results published”.

Yet perhaps most significantly, the emails from early last year expose yet again how key science journals, supposed to promote unfettered debate among experts, instead pushed the idea that anyone questioning the notion of natural transmission from animals was a wild-eyed conspiracy nut. There has been alarm over The Lancet, along with the likes of Nature and Scientific American, for their roles in inflaming such myopic viewpoints, sparking concern over the Chinese ties of their corporate owners. Such fears are heightened when even Peter Ben Embarek, head of the World Health Organisation’s patsy study into the origins, suddenly turns round — as he did yesterday — and says Patient Zero in the pandemic may be a worker at a Wuhan laboratory after all.

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But these latest emails provoke serious questions over another influential journal, Emerging Microbes & Infections, which is printed by Taylor & Francis, the blue-chip British publisher with roots stretching back to the eighteenth century.

Last February, this journal published a widely-cited commentary by four US-based scientists under the title: “No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of Sars-CoV-2.” The newly obtained emails show the article was “invited” by Shan Lu, a professor in Massachusetts who co-edits the journal. Later, Prof Liu mentions comments and changes suggested by Shi Zhengli, the WIV virologist nicknamed “Batwoman” whose research was backed by Daszak. The pair found scores of Sars-like viruses in the bat caves of southern China, hundreds of miles from Wuhan.

The commentary appears to be carefully crafted to skirt around vexatious issues that might raise concerns over possible laboratory links. For instance, the emails show that the title was changed from “Sars-CoV-2: no evidence of laboratory origin”. This was suggested by Prof Liu since “we cannot rule out the possibility that it comes from a bat virus leaked out of a lab”. Later, he acknowledged rumours that the “furin cleavage site” — which allows the spike protein to bind efficiently to cells in human tissues — “may be engineered”. Similarly, another author admitted this could be “a marker for where the virus came from — frightening to think it may have been engineered”. Strangely, despite these emails, there was no mention of this furin site in the final statement, although it is one of the most striking aspects of the new virus and not found in similar coronaviruses.

The correspondence also shows a trio of US-based experts discussing whether to mention the risks of working with contagious coronaviruses in the statement. One suggested they should emphasise that “although Sars-CoV-2 shows no evidence of laboratory origins, viruses with such great public health threats must be handled properly in the laboratory and properly regulated”. This appeared in the final version.)

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The journal’s Shanghai-based editorial office accepted the article within 12 hours. Such alacrity does not suggest the most rigorous peer review process, although one peer reviewer still hailed the “timely commentary” with a suggestion it must be published “right away”. Indeed, it’s curious that the newly obtained email chain shows editor Shan Lu telling two of the authors he would share a “secret” with them — that Taylor & Francis could become “very suspicious” when he pushed “a super fast review and accept (basically no review)”.

Their correspondence does not stop there. Linda Saif, another Ohio State University virologist, was asked to sign the commentary “to dispute some rumors”. She agreed by saying “I too feel strongly about denouncing this” — so strongly, in fact, that she also signed The Lancet commentary.

Another signatory was Lishan Su, a Chinese-born virologist then working at the same University of North Carolina as a prominent epidemiologist called Ralph Baric, who carried out hugely controversial research with Shi Zhengli that spliced a pair of coronaviruses to create a powerful chimeric version with potential to infect human airways.

Apologies for this blizzard of names, but bear with me. For the emails indicate that Baric was also consulted to review the Emerging Microbes & Infections statement before publication. Editor Shan Lu said, however, that they did not want to “appear that we are defending Ralph even though he did nothing wrong.” (Baric, incidentally, went on to sign a significant letter with 17 other prominent figures to Science three months ago, which helped change the dominant narrative by insisting “theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable”.)

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But let’s return to that cutting-edge research by Baric and “Batwoman”. For another set of emails obtained by Buzzfeed have revealed that a copy of their paper — published in 2015 — was sent to Anthony Fauci, the leading US infectious diseases expert, at the end of January last year with a magazine article on how researchers were trying to unravel the pandemic origins that mentioned Shi’s work with Daszak. Fauci instantly circulated them around top US officials. He also contacted Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, who agreed to host a conference call the next day with eleven other experts. Lo and behold, within days some of these key figures had discounted previous strongly-held concerns about possible laboratory link — and then started attacking such “conspiracy theories” in journals, debates and on social media.

The dates of these events are intriguing. Five days after that conference call, Daszak started circulating the draft of the proposed Lancet statement — which was signed also by Farrar and two Wellcome Trust colleagues. This was published on February 19. One week later, Emerging Microbes and Infections printed its own commentary adopting a similar standpoint. The following month, four of the five participants on the conference call published another important commentary in Nature — which Farrar later admitted he convened — stating firmly that they did not believe “any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.

Why might a reputable British publisher act in such a manner? Well, it is worth noting that Emerging Microbes & Infections is published with a Chinese firm. It may not be the world’s best-known journal, but this commentary has been viewed 81,000 times and was the third most downloaded article last year for Taylor & Francis, a firm that publishes more than 2,500 academic journals. It’s also striking that members of the Emerging Microbes & Infections editorial board include a scientist who is a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army and was second in command of the military team sent into Wuhan to respond to the crisis, as well as two scientists who sought to change the name of the new virus to distance it from China and a top public health official in Beijing involved in the World Health Organisation’s inquiries into the origins.

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Taylor & Francis did not respond to any of my queries on these issues. But on its website, it talks boldly of “enabling the latest academic thinking and discovery to be shared and built on”. Certainly it has pushed hard into the Chinese market — alongside its owner, the British-based exhibitions giant Informa — since opening an office in Shanghai in 2005. Indeed, the publisher has been criticised in the past for dropping dozens of journals from its offerings to Chinese libraries at the Communist regime’s request. The firm has denied bowing to censorship.

But it is hard to disagree with the conclusion of of Gary Ruskin, executive director of US Right To Know, on this latest twist in the origins saga: “The fact that Emerging Microbes & Infections solicited the commentary denying lab engineering of Sars-CoV-2, and expedited it with cursory review, suggests its editors may have intended to make a political point that was highly valuable to the Chinese government.”

So whose interests have the academic publishing sector and scientific establishment really been serving in this crisis? Sadly, it does not seem to have been always the noble ideal of furthering the global quest for scientific knowledge, let alone pushing our understanding of the origins of this cruel pandemic.

How things have changed. The US and UK have vaccinated most of their populations and are reopening. Australia, on the other hand, is doing worse than ever. Last Saturday, the country broke its 2021 daily record for Covid-19 case numbers, despite roughly 60% of the population living under a strict lockdown.

International borders are still shut to all but 3,000 weekly arrivals, keeping more than 38,000 citizens stranded abroad. Meanwhile, internal borders between Australia’s states and territories closed 120 times by the end of last month. Australia is effectively fragmented into eight different countries, each with its own hard borders.

And so Australians are left with one question on their lips: when will this end? The bleak answer, at least according to the Government’s pandemic exit strategy, is not anytime soon. According to the plan, lockdowns will no longer be required when 70% of Australia’s adult population is vaccinated, and borders will reopen when 80% of adults are vaccinated. At present, however, thanks to a shortage of Pfizer jabs — combined with mixed messages from the Government and health officials regarding the safety and efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine — only 20% of Australia’s adult population is fully vaccinated (compared to 75% in the UK). Relief for beleaguered Australians is therefore months away, even under the most optimistic scenario.

How has lockdown become so acceptable in Australia, a country where the seven-day average for Covid-19 deaths sits at just two? The answer, I suspect, is because its impacts are not equally shared.

Lockdowns’ worst effects have not been felt by Australia’s elites, including the professional middle classes, who dominate the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, the media and the academy. The same social classes also dominate politics, since today’s professionalised political parties are only weakly linked to their erstwhile social foundations. Consequently, their interests and worldviews have shaped the framing of the pandemic and responses to it.

It is by now well-documented that the pandemic’s impacts have widely diverged along the fault-lines of pre-existing social divides, often deepening disadvantage. And nowhere has this been demonstrated more clearly than in Australia.

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While the Government’s main support schemes, JobKeeper and JobSeeker, wound up earlier this year, elite and middle-class incomes have continued to grow during the cycle of lockdowns, increasing already yawning gaps. Throughout the country, the industries worst affected by Covid-19 were twice as likely to employ workers with less than high-school qualifications. While incomes in the worst-affected industries more than halved, in the least affected industries they remained unchanged.

Higher income households have also saved a higher proportion of their income. As saving rates shot up last year, reaching an average 22% in Australia — the highest in 60 years — richer households again benefited disproportionately. Their additional income was funnelled into investments, growing household wealth. Similarly, property prices in Australia rose 16.1% in the 12 months to July 2021, and the share market reached its highest-ever level on 10 August 2021, with the gains accruing mainly at the top. Most striking, however, has been the transfer of wealth to the richest of the rich. Australia’s billionaires had doubled their wealth during the pandemic’s first year.

For a time, economic growth resumed and unemployment dipped to 5%, though 60% of all new jobs were casual or part-time. The recent wave of lockdowns impacting Australia’s biggest cities has upended Australia’s fragile recovery, however, causing economic activity to contract by an estimated $13bn in the September quarter alone. While elites and professionals settled back into their domestic bubbles, many lower paid and blue-collar workers carried on as before or bore the brunt of the economic fallout.

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After all, someone has to leave their home to ensure the taps don’t run dry, clean Covid exposure sites, stock supermarket shelves and collect the rubbish. During Sydney’s current lockdown, one in ten infected residents caught the coronavirus at work. Since many of these workplaces are essential, this limits the efficacy of the lockdown, which has no end in sight.

Yet in some ways, these workers may be grateful to have a job. The number of unemployed in Sydney swelled by 300,000 over recent weeks, while casual workers’ shifts in the hospitality industry were cut by two-thirds. Although state and federal payments to workers and small businesses for lost income were boosted in July, the current patchwork of payment schemes exclude many, for example, all those who are receiving welfare payments, who are consequently struggling to survive. In Sydney alone they number 400,000.

In 1996, iconoclast American historian Christopher Lasch’s book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, was published posthumously in America — yet its resonance today is surely apparent in Australia. In the book, Lasch argues that elites in Western societies, including the professional middle classes, have abandoned their responsibilities towards their fellow-citizens and nations, orienting themselves towards cosmopolitan identities and agendas. Noblesse oblige, as limited as it was, was replaced by a sense of moral superiority, derived from the feeling that their elevated position in society was earned and meritorious.

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If Lasch had been around today he would have readily recognised that the elites in our Covid-stricken societies — not just in Australia — are still in revolt. Faced with these devastating impacts on their fellow-citizens, many elites and middle-class professionals have preferred to look the other way, conflating their own interests with society’s.

They have become lockdown’s biggest cheerleaders and portray their own compliance with lockdown rules as an expression of individual moral superiority, conveniently forgetting that the privileges afforded by their income and lifestyle are not shared by all. They have dismissed resistance to lockdowns as extremism, although evidence from recent rallies in Australia suggests that a number of participants were not fringe-dwelling conspiracists, but ordinary people struggling with long lockdowns.

Although counterfactuals are always fraught, it is hard to imagine lockdowns becoming a mainstream public health measure in a world in which elite interests would have been badly harmed by them. Elites’ disregard for the rest of society makes matters worse. In the longer term, however, the unequal effect of its many lockdowns is likely to deepen the legitimacy crisis already plaguing Australia’s democracy.

As in personal life, so too in business and civil society. Each year hundreds of thousands of businesses cease trading. In 2019, even before the pandemic, there were 336,000 business “deaths” — 11% of all British businesses. Factories and workshops close, while industries decline and sometimes vanish completely. Once-vibrant clubs and churches gradually dwindle.

Even at the level of states and governments, nothing lasts forever. Countries and languages and whole peoples disappear with tragic regularity. Over lockdown, I read Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms, a series of elegies for various European states, or statelets, that are no more. Some are widely known, like the Soviet Union or the Byzantine Empire. Others are much less celebrated, even among history buffs. Davies includes a chapter dealing with the Visigothic state that existed in eastern France in the century after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. It lasted less than a century before being subsumed into the Kingdom of the Franks. But perhaps his most obscure case study is the Republic of Rusyn, a short-lived attempt by Carpatho-Ukrainians to carve out an independent nation from the ruins of Czechoslovakia, as it was being dismembered by Nazi Germany, Hungary and Poland in March 1939.

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As I read about these statelets struggling to survive, Covid-19 was causing human suffering and misery on a massive scale — not simply deaths, but strain on medical staff, family separations and ongoing disruption to normal life and health system operation. The Government and the health service were making serious and repeated mistakes. Vital organs of the state were hesitant and sclerotic, highly susceptible to groupthink. It was easy to think: this is how a nation collapses.

Indeed, there has been a widespread sense that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining event, that the world has changed irrevocably, that we must re-examine our assumptions about numerous aspects of modern life. The giant consulting firm McKinsey produced a report called “The future of work after Covid-19”, while its rival EY issued one focusing on the changes to globalised supply chains. The Economics Observatory asked “What is the future of commuting?” The Centre For Cities think tank investigated whether cities themselves have a future anymore.

But Vanished Kingdoms — I hesitate to use the dread phrase “putting in perspective”, because that sounds glib — made me reflect on what it takes, really, to destroy a way of life. Not to trivialise people’s grim experiences, but when you read about, say, the Russian invasion of East Prussia in the last year of the Second World War — invasion is almost too antiseptic a word; destruction would meet the case — it does inevitably offer a new baseline for the consideration of terrible events.

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Obviously, its’s little or no comfort to someone who has lost a family member to Covid — or a job or a home — that it could be worse: they could be living in a chaotic post-Roman kingdom menaced by enemies on all sides. But when we come to reflect on the specific political-historical-civilisational questions raised by the pandemic — the future of work, of the health service, of global trade — it’s important to have some kind of benchmark. Particularly because, in the modern West, there is a prevailing sense that we have little to learn from history, because we are so advanced. My generation grew up during the 1990s “holiday from history”, when the power of liberal democracy was unchallenged and its future seemingly secure. No wonder Covid-19 feels like the end of the world.

But one very obvious lesson of history is that we are fortunate, even during a plague, to live in Europe in the early twenty-first century. We are lucky to have strong nation-states, able and willing to look after their people, and well-established norms of diplomacy and international co-operation. However badly her Majesty’s Government has failed in its responsibilities, the nation has not yet been annexed by neighbouring powers, as happened to the venerable Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the late eighteenth century, weakened by infighting and loss of trust in government.

That said, it is worth noting that Davies, writing in 2011, does argue that the United Kingdom in its current form is not long for this world — mainly because of the loss of confidence in the shared beliefs and institutions that held its four nations together: Crown, Empire, and Protestant Christianity.

Covid, by itself, is not going to bring an end to the largely orderly and peaceable Europe of 2021, in the way that — for example — the World Wars were catastrophic for so many of the peoples of central and eastern Europe featured in Vanished Kingdoms. The disease remains a serious problem, but most continental nations have now reached high levels of double vaccination — and cut their death rates accordingly. Seven European nations were added to the British government green list over the weekend, meaning that travellers from them do not need to quarantine. The suggestion by UnHerd’s Ed West, at the very start of the pandemic, that the long-term consequences might not be very severe, now seems very prescient.

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Possibly, of course, I am too optimistic. One of Davies’ subjects is the Byzantine Empire, which endured for more than a thousand years, but whose long-term fortunes were seriously affected by recurring outbreaks of plague from the sixth to the eighth centuries. Those plagues, of course, were much deadlier than Covid-19, and spread through populations without access to modern medicine; but perhaps the pessimists are right that we can expect more globalised outbreaks of serious disease. It is entirely possible that not all such diseases will be as treatable and relatively non-deadly as our current foe.

And optimism can be dangerous if it tips into arrogance. Vanished Kingdoms carries a dedication to i’r anghofiedig, a Welsh phrase which Davies translates loosely as “those whom historians tend to forget”. He explicitly frames the book as dealing with our collective tendency to absent-mindedness, our complacency in looking back on our ancestors.

It has been argued that some of the misjudgements made by the British public health establishment in the early weeks and months of the pandemic stemmed from a kind of instinctive resistance among highly educated, high-status people to solutions that were redolent of historical responses to disease outbreaks. Why did it take so long to impose any kind of meaningful border restrictions? Why did it take the best part of a year for masking and good ventilation, rather than mostly pointless hand-washing and surface cleaning, to be strongly prioritised in advice to the public and to hospitals, schools and shops?

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The answer to these questions, perhaps, is that closing the borders and emphasising the importance of fresh, clean air sounded too simple to be true. It’s what people did in the age of the plague — when our allegedly simple-minded forebears still believed in dirty foreigners, miasma theory and bodily humours — so it must be rejected by sophisticated moderns. As the great Theodore Dalrymple has noted, intellectuals are incentivised to avoid obvious conclusions, because their status depends on the elucidation of non-obvious truths. And liberal modernity encourages us to throw out the baby with the bathwater: to reject the wisdom of past ages, as well as the unscientific mistakes and prejudices.

Davies would, I fancy, dislike such disdain, even if held unconsciously or instinctively. He is a humane writer, concerned not with ideology, but with truth and historical drama — and with helping us know what the past was really like. At a time when the public square is full of rancour and misinformation, inflamed by people’s understandable fears and concerns about the spread of disease and the undoubted, if unavoidable, downsides of our chosen anti-Covid strategies, his proposal is tempting. We must focus on the lessons of history, and so prioritise truth and fact — and proportion.

In the opening months of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was actively discredited by the media and scientific establishment, with anyone associated with it smeared as “racist”. The question we have to ask now is how, and why, did this happen?

To a great extent, I believe the answer lies with the world’s most powerful news outlet, the New York Times. At the start of the pandemic, the Times set the news and policy agenda on the lab leak hypothesis, discrediting it and anyone who explored it. The Times did so while taking money from Chinese state-owned propaganda outlets, such as China Daily, and while pursuing long-term investments in China that may have made the paper susceptible to the CCP’s strong-arm propaganda tactics in the first months of the pandemic.

As someone who has spent years researching the history of the Times, I was struck by the paper’s markedly pro-China bent at the start of the pandemic. It opposed Trump’s travel ban to and from China as “isolationist”. It all but ignored the unparalleled success of China’s arch-enemy, Taiwan, in containing the virus. It downplayed China’s economic war against Australia, whose prime minister early on questioned the CCP story on the pandemic’s origins. And it celebrated China’s success in battling Covid-19, taking the CCP’s absurd mortality numbers at face value, reporting in August 2020 that 4,634 Chinese people died from the virus and, six months later, that there were 4,636 total deaths. That in a country of 1.4 billion people only two people died of Covid-19 in the half a year defies logic and common sense. Still, the Times legitimised the CCP numbers by printing them as hard fact.

Of course, over the past year newspapers across the world have fallen for the CCP’s distorted Covid-19 narrative. And there is no evidence to suggest that the CCP did put pressure on the Times. But when it came to the lab leak debate, the Times was relentless. Starting in early 2020, when little was known about the virus — and nothing about its origins — the Times adopted a stridently anti-lab leak stance. In its first report on the topic, a February 17, 2020 article covering comments made by Sen. Tom Cotton, the Times stigmatised lab leak as a “fringe theory”. Once the story was published, its reporter took to Twitter to describe it as “the kind of conspiracy once reserved for the tinfoil hatters”.

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Only one week prior, another outlet made strikingly similar claims. In an editorial, the CCP-owned China Daily thundered that Cotton’s decision to spread “malicious rumors” shows “how irresponsible some are in their haste to attack China”. The Times, echoing China Daily, also cast the lab leak hypothesis as a “rumor”.

Over the months, the Times’s coverage grew even more strident — and more in line with Chinese propaganda. In February 2020, it gave a platform to zoologist Peter Daszak, publishing an opinion piece by him which claimed that the pandemic was caused by “road-building, deforestation, land clearing and agricultural development”. Daszak argued that “discovering and sequencing” viruses like Covid-19 in labs like the one in Wuhan should be a priority.

The Times, which used Daszak as a key source in over a dozen articles, has never mentioned that Daszak’s organisation funded the Wuhan lab, in particular research into bats and coronaviruses, a flagrant conflict of interest. Crucially, there was no mention of this when a reporter interviewed Daszak this February, following his return from a heavily criticised WHO investigation into the virus’s origins. (Danszak later recused himself from the investigation because of the conflict of interest.)

But the Times also never revealed that Daszak was a favoured source for another outlet: China Daily. The state-owned media organisation, along with Xinhua and sister outlet Global Times, repeatedly quoted Daszak to assure readers of China’s full cooperation in the search for the virus’s origins — and to discredit the possibility of a lab leak.

In fact, the Times appears to have been so enthusiastic in its attempts to discredit the lab leak hypothesis that Chinese propaganda outlets promoted its reporting on social media. In April 2020, for instance, the Times published an article claiming the Trump Administration’s investigation into a lab leak “has echoes of the Bush administration’s 2002 push for assessments saying that Iraq had weapons of mass of destruction.” Within minutes, a China Daily columnist retweeted the story and parroted its central claim.

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But why would the Times stake its credibility on a position that had no evidence behind it, and one that, as we are now discovering, looks increasingly unlikely? Was it simply a knee-jerk response by a liberal outlet to President Trump’s endorsement of the lab leak hypothesis at the time? Perhaps — but I suspect the answer is more complicated than that. Researching and writing my new book, I discovered that the Times has a dark history of inadvertently helping authoritarian regimes with its reporting, including the Nazis, the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro.

In the case of China, this appears true to an alarming degree. For over a decade, the Times has nurtured a special relationship with the CCP — though we can only speculate as to whether this influenced its editorial output. Still, the Times certainly appeared unconcerned about the appearance of impropriety as it took millions of dollars from Chinese propaganda outlets, most prominently China Daily. In exchange for this badly needed revenue, the Times has published hundreds of “advertorials” written by Chinese propaganda outlets, including China Daily, which promote CCP messaging on the most serious topics, such as a double-page spread on the hotly contested Diaoyu Islands brazenly titled: “Diaoyu Islands Belong to China”.

But the paper’s advertising relationship with Chinese state outlets is only the visible part of the iceberg. In 2012, seeking to capitalise on China’s burgeoning middle and upper classes, the Times launched a Chinese edition of its daily paper followed by the launch of a luxury lifestyle magazine. “The appetite for New York Times journalism in Chinese has never been stronger,” a company press release stated at the time.

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In investing so heavily in China, the Times unintentionally handed the rapacious CCP an editorial lever to sway coverage. The Times learned this first-hand when, in 2012, the CCP blocked Chinese access to the Times online in retaliation for an unfavourable article on the family finances of China’s outgoing premier, Wen Jiabao. The Times set out on a year-long “lobbying” effort to restore coverage that included meetings with Xinhua, the parent of China Daily.

Today, however, just as the tide is turning on the lab leak debate, so too is the Times’s approach to the subject. Last summer, the Times abruptly ended its advertising relationship with Chinese state media outlets and scrubbed all trace of the advertorials from its archive. And in recent months, it has published a handful of articles quoting scientists who believe we should take seriously the prospect of a lab leak.

But does this excuse the paper’s behaviour at the start of the pandemic?

Of course, the New York Times, like so many industry-leading corporations, should be expected to make mistakes. But unlike other big businesses, this one is entrusted with shaping our reality — especially on murky issues as critical as the origins of a pandemic that claimed four million lives. Only time will tell whether the lab leak hypothesis is true or false. But whatever the result, what a tragedy it would be if the Times’s coverage delayed that verdict.

Husband and wife Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley did most of the research for Until Proven Safe before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Perhaps they felt strangely lucky, then, as the world descended into the current age of lockdowns and self-isolation, their study of “the history and future of quarantine” taking on a sharp new relevance.

Reading the book, there’s a case to be made that the just-to-be-sure quarantining began in fourteenth-century Dubrovnik, where travellers from areas known to be infested with the Black Death weren’t allowed to enter the walled city until they’d spent a month on a nearby small island. Similar schemes were adopted for maritime visitors to Venice, where you can still visit the lazarettos — quarantine hospitals — that were built especially for this purpose. Even lacking the germ theory of disease, the powers-that-be in these ancient cities intuited that separating was a way of protecting.

In the modern era, with a much better understanding of germs, we sometimes quarantine humans when we don’t really believe it’s necessary: recall the famous photo of the Apollo 11 astronauts, having just returned from their successful moon landing, meeting Richard Nixon from behind a window in a sealed metal box. They were quarantined for three weeks just in case they’d brought back some unknown alien pathogen from the moon — even though it was strongly suspected that (as we now know) the surface of the moon was sterile, and no such pathogens existed.

We’ve been less strict when it comes to the animal kingdom, where we can see some of the most drastic consequences of not quarantining playing out. Think of the episode of The Simpsons where Bart sneaks his pet bullfrog into Australia, whereupon it promptly escapes, reproduces, and devastates all the crops in the country. Manaugh and Twilley remind the reader of the UK’s terrible foot-and-mouth disease crisis in 2001, which originated in pigs who had been fed illegally imported pork from Asia. They also describe how Florida’s citrus industry has been in decline for years due in large part to the insect pest known as the psyllid. Only extremely strict quarantine of incoming plants by the state of California has stopped something similar happening to its famous oranges.

And remember the “friendship tree” that Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron planted on the White House lawn in 2018? Being from France, its roots were specially wrapped in plastic so as not to spread anything nasty to the US — and it was immediately dug up and sent for a two-year quarantine as soon as the cameras were switched off. (In a definitely-not-metaphorical development, it died before it was returned).

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It might seem to be stretching the term, but we quarantine some non-living objects, too: containers of radioactive waste are “quarantined” deep underground until they’re no longer dangerous. That, as Manaugh and Twilley explain, might be a very long time — long enough that scientists have tried to develop universal signs and symbols to communicate with civilisations thousands of years in the future who might have languages very different from our own: “there is bad stuff here – it is dangerous”.

So, animal, vegetable, and mineral: we routinely quarantine them all. Until Proven Safe argues that quarantine is a fundamental part of how societies deal with uncertainty. The lazaretto, the quarantine greenhouse and the concreted-over mine facility full of radioactive waste are, as the authors put it, “what results when abstract arguments over risk are given architectural form” — our best attempts at seeking the certainty we so badly need in the face of terrifying, and sometimes existential, dangers.

But the book left me with one massive unanswered question. If quarantine is such a well-understood process, with such a long history, how come we fumbled it so badly during Covid-19?

The will-they-won’t-they history of the UK Government’s decisions about border quarantine is recounted in a long document by the Home Affairs Select Committee from August 2020. As the disease began to spread outside of China in February last year, our government put in place some relatively light measures: those who had been in Wuhan, Iran or some parts of South Korea were asked nicely to stay at home after arrival at a UK airport, even if asymptomatic; those who had been in Northern Italy or a few other locations where cases had been found did “not need to undertake any special measures” unless they had symptoms. Even though there was to be no UK lazaretto, at least there was a gesture towards keeping incoming high-risk guests apart from the population at large.

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Then, on 13 March, this advice was completely dropped. As the outbreak began to spread into Europe, our government decided to remove some of its advice for border quarantines. As a Select Committee report five months later put it: “The decision to lift all Covid-19-related guidance for international arrivals on 13 March, just as other countries were expanding their border measures, is inexplicable.”

It would be 10 days until the first lockdown began in the UK — ten days in which thousands of people with Covid-19 entered the country and wouldn’t have had to isolate at home (as everyone would, when lockdown later came in), and certainly wouldn’t have to be tested as they arrived at the border. Even after lockdown began, there wasn’t the slightest question of us instituting a mandatory quarantine, despite other countries at the same time requiring incoming travellers, few though there were by this time, to stay locked in a hotel or other special facility for periods of as many as 21 days (that being, at one point, the length of the mandatory quarantine in Hong Kong). Incredibly, the UK only began a mandatory hotel-based quarantine on 15 February 2021 — and only for some countries — more than a full year since the first Covid case arrived on our shores.

Calling the decision inexplicable is understandable. But let’s try to explain it. Perhaps some thought that, since border measures like quarantine wouldn’t stop all cases, they weren’t worth instituting. This all-or-nothing argument has certainly been made in other contexts — for masks or even vaccines — and it betrays a magic-bullet mentality: defeating a contagious disease takes a lot of different measures, none of which will ever be 100% effective. Manaugh and Twilley note the irony that if a quarantine works — if it stops disease transmission — then it will in retrospect be seen as an overreaction.

Was quarantine thought to be a bit too disruptive, a bit too difficult, to institute? Perhaps, though of course we did eventually end up instituting it, and if the story of vaccines has shown us anything, it’s that we can move mountains to get something done if we feel we really have to.

Were some scientific advisers, and perhaps politicians, unable to decouple the idea of border quarantine (or indeed travel bans) from politically-unpalatable views in their minds? The authors of Until Proven Safe do note the political angle: treating foreigners, immigrants, or refugees as if they were carriers of disease (or were a disease themselves) has been the preserve of authoritarian, racist, populist leaders. Could an innate aversion to being like those bad people have skewed the experts’ judgement?

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There is some evidence for this, with Sage fretting early in the pandemic that border measures would need to be “draconian” to hold back the spread — a choice of words that clearly indicated disapproval. In fact, those measures may have been the proverbial stitch in time that would’ve saved, well, a lot of lives — and to draw comparison between actions taken during a pandemic emergency and those in “normal” times is irrational in any case.

Or maybe there’s an even more disturbing explanation: that quarantines weren’t instituted because, at the start of the crisis, the UK’s scientific advisers thought it would be a good thing if as many people as possible caught the disease. The idea that a strong quarantine system could render the “herd immunity” plan unnecessary doesn’t seem to have occurred, even though it did to policymakers in Hong Kong, New Zealand and elsewhere.

In any case, few of the lessons from history described in Until Proven Safe were applied during the history we’ve just lived through. The simple idea that “keeping people in quarantine, even if you’re not sure they’re infected, helps to hold back a contagious disease” seems to have been lost in the morass of counter-intuitive thinking that swirled around the start of the pandemic.

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By Ed West

Maybe we can learn the lessons for next time: what of the future of quarantine? Manaugh and Twilley say that it might not look like quarantine at all. They discuss DARPA’s Prometheus project, where the idea is to develop a way of predicting whether someone, once infected with a disease, will be contagious. One of the nastiest things about Covid is, of course, that people can still spread the disease before seeing any symptoms — if they get symptoms at all. Such a system could help us pinpoint the people who need to be isolated — and would, to return to the theme, help reduce a big source of uncertainty.

But anyone who’s had a visit to the pub cancelled because of the UK’s “pingdemic” should know that technological solutions are wont to go awry; we can predict endless angry debate over the rate of false-positives and false-negatives from a Prometheus-like system should it ever come to be used. Far from putting all our eggs in technology’s basket, we should be open to the central point of Until Proven Safe: although the low-tech idea of setting possibly-contagious people apart could be made more effective, more equitable, and more humane — we wouldn’t have a history so full of quarantine if it didn’t really work.

The board members included Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, alongside George F Gao, director-general of China’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, and Anthony Fauci, the US infectious diseases expert and presidential adviser. This was not surprising: Farrar is an expert in tropical diseases as well as head of Europe’s biggest philanthropic research funding body and a sure-footed political operator in the world of public health. His £29bn foundation also helped cover costs for the board.

They were, of course, proved right almost instantly. Sadly, their report came too late to achieve its valiant aim of stepping up preparation for a pandemic given the speed of Covid-19’s spread from Wuhan last year. Yet their words were astonishingly prescient. And among the risks highlighted by these experts were the technological advances that “allow for disease-creating micro-organisms to be engineered or recreated in laboratories”, warning how their accidental release might be more devastating than a natural epidemic: “Accidental or deliberate events caused by high-impact respiratory pathogens pose global catastrophic biological risks.”

History shows that labs can leak. So it is strange that Farrar, like his two expert friends, has played such a pivotal role in stifling suggestions that this new virus might have come from a laboratory rather than emerged through natural zoonotic transmission from animals. Spike: The Virus v The People — his book co-authored with Anjana Ahuja from the Financial Times — is a rather self-promotional work, lambasting the politicians he has been advising as a member of Sage for their failures in handling the disease, although his defence of publication seems valid. “Everyone needs to learn the lessons, scientists included,” he writes. “We only honour the dead by pledging to learn from the mistakes that cost them their lives. Protecting lives, and our way of life, is infinitely more important than protecting reputations.”

Such was his fury with government actions last summer that Farrar sent a memo to colleagues about the need to “be honest and transparent”. So why does he decline to answer questions about his own actions in early days of this pandemic that led to the crushing of discussion over possibility that it might be the result of some kind of incident involving one of Wuhan’s laboratories? These include Wuhan Institute of Virology, the biggest bat coronavirus research unit in Asia that was carrying out risky experiments and had known safety concerns. 

“It was odd for a spillover event, from animals to humans, to take off in people so immediately and spectacularly in a city with a biolab” writes Farrar — especially with a new virus that “seemed almost designed to infect human cells”. Many others had similar suspicions — and in recent weeks, such concerns have started being taken more seriously. 

Yet Farrar was a central figure behind two landmark documents published by influential science journals that played a key role in shutting down discussion of the lab leak hypothesis by branding it conspiracy theory. These statements, signed and promoted by leading figures in the scientific establishment, pushed an idea that the pandemic was a natural occurrence by arguing against the plausibility of “any type of laboratory-based scenario”. Critics say this “false narrative” set back understanding of the disease for more than a year.

Although Farrar criticises some aspects of China’s cover-up in his book — including confirming my report last June that scientists there had sequenced the Sars-CoV-2 genome in December 2019 before the world even knew about the disease — he went out of his way to praise Beijing in the early weeks of the pandemic. “China deserves great credit”, he gushed on Twitter in mid-January. Two weeks later he claimed it was “setting a new standard for outbreak response and deserves all our thanks”. Yet the reality was a Communist dictatorship that silenced doctors trying to warn citizens, covered up human transmission and allowed Chinese New Year festivities to carry on despite this entailing the largest annual migration of people on the planet. 

As the Wellcome boss says, “speed matters perhaps more than anything else in disease outbreaks”. Certainly things moved fast the day after that tweet when Fauci was sent an article in Science magazine examining how researchers were trying to unravel the virus origins. It detailed work by British scientist Peter Daszak and his friend Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in sampling thousands of bats and finding 500 new coronaviruses. The article discussed controversies over risky “gain of function” experiments, including mention of a 2015 paper by Shi and a US expert on modification of a Sars-like bat virus to boost infectivity to humans.

Emails released through freedom of information requests show Fauci instantly circulated the article to US officials and contacted Farrar saying it was “of interest to the current discussion”. The Wellcome boss then set up a conference call for the pair of them with 11 other experts from around the world, warning their discussions were “in total confidence” and information “not to be shared” without prior agreement. Farrar also sent Fauci a link to an article on ZeroHedge, a financial blog, that tied a Wuhan researcher to the virus outbreak. The site was banned the next day from Twitter — a move the social media firm later admitted was “an error”.

We do not know full details of what was discussed on the 1 February call since many of the emails were redacted and Farrar refused to tell me when I asked his office. We do know there were discussions that day over contacting Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the WHO, with fears he might “prevaricate” — and that two days later the Ethiopian doctor made a call to “combat the spread of rumours and misinformation” and for countries “to work together in a spirit of solidarity”. 

We also know that five days after the conference call, Daszak began circulating the draft of a statement published later that month in The Lancet. This letter, signed by 27 global experts including Farrar and two Wellcome Trust colleagues, condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. Later it emerged that Daszak had organised this missive, telling signatories they must ensure it was not “identifiable” as coming from one person or organisation so it was seen as “simply a letter from leading scientists”. 

This Lancet statement played a key role in stifling discussion of a possible lab leak. Such was its influence that Facebook reportedly used it to block discussion of the idea — leading to one of my articles being labelled a conspiracy theory. Yet four signatories have since said the hypothesis merits investigation — with one now convinced Sars-CoV-2 arose from a “sloppy” researcher. Strangely, Farrar does not mention the Lancet letter in his book. And there is only brief mention of Daszak, saying he should not have joined the WHO study team in Wuhan after dismissing the lab origin — including in a Guardian article attacking “conspiracy theories”, an article that Farrar promoted on social media. “Always worth reading @PeterDaszak” the Wellcome chief tweeted.

Among the participants in Farrar’s call were four of the five eminent experts who published a commentary six weeks later in Nature Medicine entitled “The proximal origin of Sars-CoV-2”. This quintet — with lead author Kristian Andersen, an immunologist at Scripps Research institute in California — stated firmly that they “do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”. This statement in a world-renowned journal, which has been accessed 5.5 million times, further depressed debate of alternative theories on the origins, despite being challenged by a few brave voices in the scientific community.

Yet the release of thousands of Fauci emails last month revealed that Andersen, when sent the Science article at the end of January, admitted a close look at the genetic sequences of Sars-CoV-2 showed that “some of the features (potentially) look engineered” and that other experts agreed the genome was “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”. Andersen later explained this showed “clear example of the scientific process” — then deleted his combative account on Twitter. 

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Now things become even more perplexing with the release of Farrar’s book. He admits he was terrified by the “huge coincidence” of a coronavirus cropping up in “a city with a superlab” and the geo-political implications of a leak at a time of US-Sino tensions. “This was a brand-new virus that seemingly sprang from nowhere,” he says. “Except that this pathogen had surfaced in Wuhan, a city with a BSL-4 virology lab which is home to an almost unrivalled collection of bat viruses.”

The new coronavirus “might not even be that novel at all”, he thought. “It might have been engineered years ago, put in a freezer, and then taken out more recently by someone who decided to work on it again. And then, maybe, there was … an accident?” He was so concerned that he confided in Eliza Manningham-Buller, then the Wellcome Trust chair and a former head of the MI5 intelligence service, who told him to start taking precautions such as avoiding putting things in emails and using a burner phone for key conversations.

So what changed his mind so firmly he started signing letters and tweeting about alleged conspiracy theories? When I asked Farrar to share the evidence that set his mind at rest, he pointed to the Nature Medicine article. Yet his office told me later he helped “convene” these five authors. They also insist that “the weight of available data and scientific evidence continues to point towards zoonotic origins”. But scientists have found no hard evidence on the pandemic origins, despite testing 80,000 samples on animals to find a natural link, while China has made increasingly ludicrous claims over the origins as well as covering up the outbreak, lying over the date of first cases and taking offline Wuhan’s key database of samples and viral sequences.

Now Farrar writes that at the end of January Andersen “confessed” that three things alarmed him about the new virus: its receptor binding domain, which attaches to infect a host cell and “looked too good to be true — like a perfect key for entering human cells”; the furin cleavage site, not found on similar categories of bat coronaviruses and something expected “if someone had set out to adapt an animal coronavirus to humans by taking a specific suit of genetic material from elsewhere and inserting it”; and a scientific paper using this technique to modify the original Sars virus behind the 2003 outbreak that “looked like a how-to manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory”.

Before the call on 1 February, Farrar says Andersen was “60 to 70%” convinced the virus came from a lab, while Australian virologist Eddie Holmes was “80% sure this thing had come out of a lab”. Patrick Vallance, Britain’s chief scientific officer who joined the call, tipped off intelligence agencies about their concerns. But others on the hour-long call argued the new virus “was more convincingly explained, scientifically, as a natural spillover than a laboratory event”. Afterwards, the participants swapped notes but Farrar remained torn on the origins. “On a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release I am honestly at 50,” he emailed Fauci. “My guess is this will remain grey unless there is access to the Wuhan lab — and I suspect that is unlikely.”

Anderson told him that he suddenly realised he might be the person who proved the new virus came from a lab. “I didn’t necessarily want to be that person,” he said. “When you make big claims like that you had better be sure that you can conclude something is based on evidence and not on speculation.” So according to Farrar, then five experts wrestled with the evidence and, the following month, they declared in Nature Medicine that Sars-CoV-2 was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”. 

They accepted the virus had strange properties that made it so virulent. But Farrar says their conclusion was based on the fact that it attaches to human cells so differently from the first Sars while also unlike “any of the known viruses used in gain of function research”. This was said to make “deliberate manipulation an implausible scenario” on grounds that “the most methodical way of conjuring up a nightmare virus would be to take a virus that is already a known quantity and crank up its infectivity”. They offered the circumstantial evidence that RaTG13, the closest known coronavirus to Sars-CoV-2, had different binding mechanisms — yet similar ones were found on pangolins, so “the ingredients…were out in the wild. They did not need to have escaped, or been unleashed, from a containment lab.”

This is a reasonable argument — but it is not firm evidence. Nor is it any more convincing than the idea of a leak. Not least since Shi has admitted to collecting eight more Sars-like viruses alongside RaTG13 in southern China that have not been shared, along with all those samples on the Wuhan Institute of Virology database that was mysteriously taken offline in September 2019. Shi was also forced to clarify the Nature paper she wrote on RaTG13 since she did not disclose its name had been changed from another virus identified in a previous paper. This masked a link to three miners who died from a strange respiratory disease caught while clearing out bat droppings in a cave hundreds of miles from Wuhan that was used by Shi and her colleagues to collect samples from bats.

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There is another weird twist to Farrar’s story. He writes how the quintet published their findings in Nature Medicine “after the addition of new information, endless analyses, intense discussions and many sleepless nights” and agonising over the information. But two months ago Robert Garry, one of the authors, was interviewed about their efforts. “We looked at the possibility of lab creation,” he said. “We gave it every unbiased look. Our conclusion was it was very unlikely that it was a constructed virus cobbled together somehow in the lab.” Fair enough. Yet he added that “the first draft was complete on 1 February” — which was, of course, the same day as that conference call led by Farrar.

The Fauci emails also show that three days later, Farrar sent over “a very rough first draft from Eddie and the team”, urging his American friend to keep it confidential. The email trail includes a note from Holmes — who was an adviser to Beijing’s CDC — saying he was sending a summary that would be further edited. “It’s fundamental science and completely neutral as written. Did not mention other anomalies as this will make us look like loons.” When I queried this with Holmes, he responded: “It was a restriction enzyme site followed by some sequence conservation. We soon realised this was nothing untoward.” 

On the same day, however, Andersen told another group of experts that “the data conclusively show that neither (engineering for basic research or nefarious reasons) was done”. So far from having “many sleepless nights”, these scientists seem to have changed their minds amazingly fast and reached fresh conclusions.

The following day Farrar sent another note to Fauci saying the WHO had “listened and acted” and was asking for names for a group probing “the origins and evolution” of the virus. This was, presumably, the study group that — incredibly — included Daszak, despite possible conflicts of interest and one year later delivered a report downplaying a lab leak as “extremely unlikely”, which sparked furious condemnation across the West. And, yes, which Farrar said should not have included Daszak since “it would have been better for him to have recused himself and for the WHO to have appointed someone who would have been perceived as more impartial”.

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Why we should welcome the lab leak hypothesis

By Bret Weinstein

The more we learn, the stranger these events seem to become. The one point of agreement in this fierce debate on the origins is that it is vital to find the truth so the world can be better prepared for pandemics — as those 15 experts warned us weeks before the pandemic erupted. More and more scientists, along with politicians and journalists, have come to accept the lab leak hypothesis is not a conspiracy theory and merits serious investigation until the facts prove otherwise — especially after Donald Trump’s accusations were echoed by his Democrat successor Joe Biden.

Despite Farrar’s initial concern, and his involvement in the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, he sees things rather differently. He insists “the evidence strongly suggests that Covid-19 arose after a natural spillover event”, although adding that we must ensure labs are safe. “The tragedy is that this entire controversy over the origins of the pandemic coronavirus turned out to be a distraction,” he concludes defiantly. “The conspiracist blame game was a fig leaf to disguise the failure of American governance.”

Yet for all his certainty, there are valid fears that we may really have been given an unwelcome glimpse of the failures of China’s governance — and the curious role of a Western scientific establishment in suppressing a crucial debate.