Covid cases are rising again. In the UK, they have broken through the 200,000 infections-a-day threshold for the first time since April. In America, the sixth wave is well under way. In countries that kept the disease at bay for years, such as Taiwan and New Zealand, numbers are shooting up, driven by milder but highly infectious versions of the Omicron variant. The virus has not gone away, even if its death toll is much lower. But what has disappeared is any real or urgent interest from the media and the scientific establishment in finding out how it started.
Imagine if the accidental launch of a nuclear missile had killed 21 million people. It’s hard to believe the world would shrug and say: let’s not bother finding out how it happened. The Covid pandemic has killed around that number and disrupted the lives of billions. Nothing like it has happened in more than a century; it is the greatest cause of global suffering since the Forties. Yet we still do not know how it started, and much of the world seems to be increasingly incurious to find out.
We co-authored a book, Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, on this topic in 2021 and it proved to be an odd experience. Eschewing speculation and sticking to what we could prove, we delved deep into the evidence and wove together the threads that linked bat viruses from southern China or Southeast Asia with an outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019. We concluded that it was impossible to be sure yet, but two theories were plausible: spillover from an animal to a person at a market, or an accident in a laboratory or during a research field trip.
In this we are in line with the US government, the G7, the World Health Organisation and the general public, all of whom are on record as saying that they think a leak from a Wuhan virology lab is a strong possibility that deserves to be investigated. The latest WHO report two weeks ago confirms this, saying that it is important “to evaluate the possibility of the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the human population through a laboratory incident”. That is huge news. It means that an accident caused by human error may have happened on the same scale as a nuclear missile destroying New York.
Our book received praise from readers: we received letters and emails from senior scientists, politicians, businessmen, journalists, and others commending it as a non-fiction whodunnit.
All that was gratifying. But it stood in marked contrast to the reaction in much of the media. CNN invited us on to discuss the book then cancelled at the last minute — at the behest of their health editor. The BBC simply ignored the book altogether, as did the other mainstream US and UK networks. The topic remains taboo in much of the mainstream media. Reviews were mostly bad — in both senses of the word. That is to say, they were highly critical and inaccurate. In some cases, the authors said things that made clear they had not read the book but had made up their minds to dislike it. Not one but two virologists told us on Twitter that the book was full of lies — and that they had not read it. An odd thing for anybody to admit to, especially a scientist.
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington invited us to give a presentation on the book, then cancelled the invitation. We asked the Royal Society if they had considered a debate on the topic of the origin of the Covid pandemic: no, they said, it’s not a proper topic for scientific discussion. What? We tried a couple of other learned societies: no, sorry, too controversial. Seriously.
Opinion polls show that the public generally thinks the virus began with a lab leak. So virologists who think it did not ought to be keen to have an opportunity to make their case, rather than avoid debate.
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