Covid origins and the conspiracy of silence

Britain's journalistic community and mainstream media – with the exception of Mr Birrell's articles in UnHerd and The Mail on Sunday – have fallen subserviently in line with a 'consensus' it now appears was manufactured and ruthlessly enforced by agents who were far from impartial.

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Although the origins of Covid the illness took only days to identify, we seem, fully eighteen months later, little closer to conclusive proof of the origin of the Sars-CoV-2 virus that causes it. Partially, this is because such a discovery would be the end result of difficult scientifc detective work. Partially, it is because the Chinese authorities have frustrated attempts to do so. However, it is also partially due to an alarming failure of the scientific and journalist communities, which, if not corrected, could have consequences more deleterious to western society than even the pandemic itself.

As China lost control of the virus, and it developed first into a national epidemic and then a global pandemic, most experts appeared to assume it had been a zoonotic spillover event. In everyday language, this means that a virus occurs naturally in an animal population and then jumps to humans.

Almost by definition, most novel human viruses have such origins. For example, Sars, the previous well-known coronavirus outbreak in China, had been traced to palm civets kept for sale at a wet market. It therefore seemed reasonable to assume that Sars-CoV-2 infected its first human by jumping naturally from the animal kingdom.

However, some scientists noted that the initial outbreak had occurred in Wuhan, a city that hosted more than one laboratory known to have undertaken research on coronaviruses. Furthermore, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), containing China's only BSL-4 laboratory, had undertaken gain of function research, a scientific process in which viruses identified in nature are manipulated to make them infectious to humans, more transmissible or more lethal.

Viruses have escaped laboratories more frequently than we may care to imagine, including in Britain and the United States. The WIV was at the geographical centre of the outbreak, while the habitat of bats, the main animal reservoir of coronaviruses, was thousand of miles away. Was a lab leak therefore not a reasonable hypothesis for the origins of Sars-CoV-2? Was it not worth at least investigating alongside the zoonotic spillover theory?

Any efforts in this direction were swiftly crushed. On February 19th, 2020, The Lancet, perhaps the most august medical journal in the world, published a letter signed by twenty-seven prominent scientists praising the work China had undertaken on Covid, and condemning any 'conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid does not have a natural origin'. A month later, Nature, a prestigious journal of science, published 'The Proximal Origin of Sars-CoV-2', a paper by five authors, including Kristian Andersen, a leading immunologist. Its authors concluded that the origin of the virus was very likely natural, as they did 'not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible'.

‘Proximal Origin’ became widely cited, and in conjunction with the letter in The Lancet, created a 'consensus' view that the virus had emerged naturally through human contact with animals, and that anybody suggesting it might have been a lab leak was a crank.

President Donald Trump's endorsement of the lab leak hypothesis in April 2020 then made the Covid origins issue a partisan matter during a period of bitterly tribal political struggle in the run up to the US elections that year. Lab leak proponents were not just cranks anymore, but perhaps closeted Trump supporters – a cardinal sin as far as most of the media and intelligentsia were concerned – or had, as many assumed President Trump to have, an axe to grind against the Chinese, possibly motivated by racism.

Thus, by late spring 2020, next to no mainstream media outlets or journals of science would publish much work on the lab leak hypothesis, and the social media giants suppressed posts that gave it credence. Facebook would even ban users who shared such stories or analysis.

We now know the natural origins theory was just that – a theory, and not 'settled science' – and that it had no more evidence to support it than did the lab leak hypothesis. We also know that if there was any conspiracy afoot, it was among journalists, media corporations, leading scientists and the Chinese and US Governments to supress any investigation, reporting or scientific research into the lab leak hypothesis.

On May 5th this year, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists published an essay by Nicholas Wade, a veteran and highly respected science journalist, examining the evidence for the zoonotic spillover theory alongside that for the lab leak hypothesis. Some 425 days after the letter in The Lancet had claimed that scientists 'overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife' and that the lab leak hypothesis was a 'conspiracy theory' and 'misinformation', Mr Wade wrote: 'Neither the natural emergence nor the lab escape hypothesis can yet be ruled out. There is still no direct evidence for either. So no definitive conclusion can be reached.'

However, his lengthy examination of the existing information on Sars-CoV-2, and the scientific arguments for both theories, took Mr Wade one step further. Of the two hypotheses, he argued: 'Proponents of natural emergence have a rather harder story to tell.'

Mr Wade's disinterested and comprehensive explanation of the evidence, and his startling conclusion, opened the floodgates in the mainstream media. On June 3rd, Vanity Fair published a lengthy and extensively sourced exposé which alleged that sections of the US Government, including the State Department, had explicitly prevented staff from investigating the lab leak theory for fear that it would draw attention to the fact the US had itself been funding gain of function research.

Meanwhile, despite the signatories to the letter in The Lancet explicitly declaring within it that they had 'no conflict of interest', it has emerged that its author and coordinator, Peter Daszak, had worked extensively with the WIV, and funnelled grants to the WIV in order to study coronaviruses, including gain of function research, through the EcoHealth Alliance, the NGO of which Mr Daszak is President.

On June 13th, Ian Birrell, one of the few journalists to emerge from this story with his credibility enhanced, revealed for The Mail on Sunday that Kristian Anderson had been far less certain of the origins of Covid than his aforementioned ‘Proximal Origin’ paper in Nature had suggested.

In fact, Mr Birrell reported that when Anthony Fauci, the Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had asked for Professor Anderson’s opinion near the beginning of the pandemic, he told Dr Fauci that Sars-CoV-2's genetic sequences had some features that '[potentially] look engineered' and were 'inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory'.

Brett Weinstein, the Evolutionary Biologist, has castigated the scientific community for its performance during the pandemic, and for the emerging evidence that there was a conspiracy involving some of its leading figures, NGOs and elements connected to the US and UK Governments to silence or otherwise hobble efforts to reach a proper conclusion about the origins of the most damaging pandemic in a century.

In an interview with Rebel Wisdom, Professor Weinstein said: 'We have just watched the entire field of virology... sell a false story because it had conflicts of interest up the wazoo. That's a very dangerous situation. We don't have a backup field of virology – we have one. We've got a field of virology, and apparently it is entirely capable of all telling the same wrong story in unison, and belittling and stigmatising anybody who deviates from it.

'That's a very dangerous situation. There will be other pandemics, and we need to have independent scientists who are capable of telling us what we need to know, not what they want us to think.'

The same might be said of the journalistic community. For a year it has been clear that the lab leak theory was credible, and the body of evidence supporting it has only grown since. Furthermore, there has been nothing to suggest that the natural emergence hypothesis was the 'settled science' implied by the Lancet letter, Professor Anderson's ‘Proximal Origin's’ paper, and the broader scientific and government communities.

Despite this, Britain's journalistic community and mainstream media – with the exception of Mr Birrell's articles in UnHerd and The Mail on Sunday – have fallen subserviently in line with a 'consensus' it now appears was manufactured and ruthlessly enforced by agents who were far from impartial.

Professional journalists never tire of reminding us of the vital role they play in our democratic society and the maintenance of our liberty. By muckraking, and presenting complex events, facts and legislation in clear English, they give the interested citizen a view of the objective truth (which those in power would often like to hide). This is one reason societies without a free press tend to have low levels of trust in their governments and institutions, which has an insidious effect on their ability to function effectively as nations.

During the pandemic, virtually the entire Fourth Estate has abrogated this responsibility. Yet this is not the first time it has done so. It reported the received wisdom on the Iraq 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' and ‘Russiagate’ stories as truth, when neither were anything of the sort. The media establishment has clearly learned none of the lessons to be drawn from either humiliation.

Sars-CoV-2 has in some ways acted as a receding tide, exposing who was swimming naked. Much attention has been focussed on our Government's shameful unpreparedness for a disaster that has been considered likely for at least the decade since the Sars epidemic. However, bureaucratic ineptitude is much easier to fix than a journalistic community more interested in political activism and parroting stories they are spoon fed through official channels than it is about doing the hard, and sometimes unfriendly, work of reporting the truth.