UK Experts Helped Shut Down Covid Lab Leak Theory – Weeks After Being Told it Might be True
November 24th, 2022Via: Telegraph:
Top scientists including Sir Patrick Vallance were warned that Covid-19 could have evolved in laboratory animals, but collaborated in a paper which shut down the lab leak theory, it has emerged.
The paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, argued that a natural spillover event caused the pandemic, and was hugely instrumental in stifling debate into the origins of the virus.
But newly released emails from early 2020 show that in the weeks before publication the authors held lengthy discussions with experts, including Sir Patrick and Sir Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust.
In those discussions, experts were advised that the unusual features seen in Covid-19 could have evolved in animals in a lab, as well as in the wild.
They were also warned that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been carrying out research on bat-coronaviruses at worrying levels of biosecurity.
Yet by the time the paper was published, all reference to biosecurity problems in Wuhan had been removed, and the authors argued that lab evolution of the virus was unlikely.
