Have scientists suppressed the truth about Covid’s origins?

Where did Covid-19 come from? There is still no official, scientifically agreed-upon explanation for the virus that shut down the world. Four years since the first outbreak in Wuhan, China, no animal origin has ever been identified. The alternative explanation, that Covid instead emerged from a laboratory, was initially dismissed by scientists, branded a conspiracy theory by the press and censored on social media. Now the lab-leak theory has been endorsed by multiple US government agencies, declared credible by US president Joe Biden and, most recently, ‘overwhelmingly likely’ by former UK prime minister Boris Johnson. So why were scientists so eager to rubbish a plausible theory? Did they cover up what they knew about the true cause of the pandemic?

Matt Ridley – science writer and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 – sat down with spiked’s Fraser Myers to set out the evidence for the lab-leak theory – and explain how scientists tried to suppress it. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can watch the full video of the interview here.

Fraser Myers: In your view, is there a smoking gun that points to the origins of Covid-19?

Matt Ridley: Alina Chan, my co-author on Viral, and I both think that the closest thing to a smoking gun – not quite a smoking gun, but a hot weapon – is the Defuse project proposal. It came into the hands of the public in September 2021, just as we were finishing our book. More importantly, at the end of 2023, we found an earlier version of that project, which filled in some crucial gaps from the first version. It was a proposal by an American institution called the EcoHealth Alliance to undertake, in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a series of experiments on bat-derived sarbecoviruses.

One of those experiments was to put a particular sequence into such a virus for the first time. That sequence turned up roughly two years later in SARS-CoV-2. Initially, we weren’t certain that they were going to put the sequence in the right place in the virus. Nor were we certain that they were talking about SARS-like viruses. But thanks to the earlier drafts, we now know that’s exactly what they were talking about – putting it at the S1/S2 junction in the spike gene of a SARS-CoV virus for the first time.

For context, we now know that in the right city, in the right time frame, scientists had a plan to put exactly the right sequence into exactly the right part of the gene of exactly the right virus to create a blueprint for SARS-CoV-2.

The second thing we learnt from the earlier version of the Defuse proposal was that they planned to do it at biosafety level two (BSL-2). There’s a marginal exchange in the document between Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, and Ralph Baric, a coronaviroligist from the University of North Carolina. In the exchange, Daszak says that there is great advantage in doing the research in China, because they could do it at BSL-2, which is highly cost-effective, but much less safe. Baric replied that US scientists would freak out if that was said publicly, because this level really isn’t safe. The later draft says biosafety level three so as not to freak out scientists.

Myers: There seems to be a pattern of prominent scientists, or scientific institutions, saying one thing in public, while acknowledging that the lab-leak theory might be plausible in private. What do you make of this?

Ridley: This is the most extraordinary part and, for me, the most shocking. Scientists conspiring among themselves have told a different story in public from what they believe in private. This is what we found when the US Congress subpoenaed the records of the scientists who wrote ‘The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2’, a highly influential paper, which rules out the possibility that the virus was manipulated in a lab. The five authors were commissioned to write it by Anthony Fauci, who at the time was the head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Jeremy Farrar, formerly of the Wellcome Trust in the UK, among others.

They started off writing a balanced article. Then they decided to write an article saying: ‘We can rule out that it came out of a lab, right?’ What was really shocking was that they were sending messages to each other while writing the article and trying to get it published in Nature Medicine, saying they thought it was ‘friggin’ likely’ the virus came out of a lab. Those are the words of Kristian Andersen, the lead author.

I think that’s scientific misconduct. The paper should be retracted. But to do so would be to admit to misconduct on a scale that the scientific establishment does not want to do. And I’m very shocked by the behaviour of the National Academy of Sciences in the US and the Royal Society in the UK. They won’t look at this. They won’t even talk about it. It does the reputation of science no good not to investigate potential misconduct.

Myers: Do you think there might be political reasons for wanting to not have this discussion?

Ridley: Ian Williams has just written a book called Vampire State about China’s approach to the world. It has some interesting stuff on the degree to which Western academia has come to depend on Chinese money, Chinese students and Chinese collaborations. As a result, it has started to pull its punches when it comes to criticism of China.

I spoke to a very senior scientist who said, ‘Look, I really hope we don’t find out what happened, because of the damage it would do to relations between Western academia and China’. I was gobsmacked by that. Would you say that after a plane crash? ‘I really hope we don’t find out what caused the crash, because of the damage it might do to our relationship with Boeing.’ We’ve also seen emails from Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health at the time of the Covid-19 outbreak, urging against damaging ‘international harmony’. What harmony?

There are some of us who just don’t want to walk away from the fact that an episode of human history has left a 28million people dead, an even larger number of people bereaved, and a lot of people with their lives turned upside down. And the possibility of that happening again, or of terrorist organisations learning from it and deciding to go down the biological warfare route, is too frightening to give the topic up.

Matt Ridley was talking to Fraser Myers. Watch the full conversation here: