Image by Erik Nikolai Halsteinrud from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
The silence is deafening
Matt Ridley wrote a whole book about the Covid lab leak, and now marvels that what was once an unthinkable conspiracy is now quietly accepted by two thirds of the population, but still exists under a cone of silence. The Wuhan Lab Leak was “worse than a thousand Bhopals” he points out, but the Royal Society said it wasn’t a suitable topic for discussion. It’s as if the deaths of millions, the economic chaos and the threat of bioweapons is a bore.
The World Health Organization never mentions it. The Academy of Medical Sciences said it was too controversial. Ridley was invited to debate the issue but no one would take the other side. He was invited to write a paper for a prestigious journal with a professor at Oxford. After they wrote a paper with hundreds of references, the editors rejected it out of hand, telling him that there was no evidence of people doing gain-of-function experiments in Wuhan, even though the Institute of Virology has published papers for six years detailing how they did exactly that.
Ridley was invited to debate at another forum, and after much searching, and payments of more than $10,000, finally one virologist was willing to argue it was not a lab leak. Mysteriously most virologists seem to hope the biggest issue of their specialty career will just go away, quietly.
There is now very little doubt that Covid leaked from a lab
By Matt Ridley, Spiked
…two-thirds of Americans believe the virus originated in a lab in China – yet most senior scientists seem to be sublimely unbothered by the fact that the public holds this view. They show little or no interest in getting out there and persuading people to change their minds. Instead, they just hope the whole topic fades into history.
China has a database of 22,000 virus samples on it, and they won’t share it, but Western virologists and politicians don’t seem to want to see it. A thousand PhD-theses sit there undiscovered and no one cares.
Have we sold our souls, our universities, our health, for cheap fridges and trade deals?
If the lab leak had occurred in any other country, we might be more interested. As Matt Ridley explains:
A former president of the Royal Society told me he hopes we never find out what happened, lest it annoy the Chinese. Would he have said the same about Bhopal, I wondered, or a plane crash?
Why is this topic taboo? Scientists in the West have become addicted to collaboration with China. They get students and money from China. Ten British universities rely on Chinese students for more than a quarter of their income. Scientific journals get rich on Chinese publication fees. Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet and recipient of a Friendship Award from the Chinese government, went on Chinese television early in the pandemic to say: ‘I think we have a great deal to thank China for, about the way that it handled the outbreak.’
As bad as that corruption of science is, the real problem is much bigger. Ridley doesn’t mention it, but Australians know all too well why no one wants to ask for an inquiry. The second biggest economy in the world plays nasty — it’s not just about Chinese students at university, or journal sales — our whole economy is at risk. Media houses want access to 1.3 billion customers. Financial houses do too. Big Business wants to sell or buy and not get banned. Governments don’t want the flack from fighting back, and so who is left willing to speak at all?
Nobody mention why China launched that trade war on Australia…
…when Scott Morrison, Australian Prime Minister, dared ask for an investigation in April 2020, within a week China threatened boycotts, and followed up with severe anti-dumping duties on Australian barley. After which the CCP discovered “inconsistencies in labelling” on Australian beef imports, and added bans or tariffs on Australian wine, wheat, wool, sugar, copper, lobsters, timber and grapes. Then they told their importers not to bring in Australian coal, cotton or LNG either. The only industry they didn’t attack was iron ore, probably because they couldn’t get it anywhere else. In toto, the punishment destroyed about $20 billion dollars in trade, and everyone, even CNN, knew this was political retribution and a message to the world.
Matt Ridley does an excellent job unpacking the evidence:
With Professor Anton van der Merwe of Oxford University, I detailed how it is no coincidence that this virus turned up in exactly the right city at exactly the right time as they were planning exactly the right experiments that would put exactly the right insertion into exactly the right place in exactly the right gene of exactly the right kind of virus. And to do so at exactly the wrong biosafety level.
The outbreak began not just in one of the very few cities doing research on this kind of virus, but also in the city with the biggest SARS-like virus research programme on the planet.
These kinds of viruses are found a thousand miles away from Wuhan. That’s the distance of London to Rome. We know of only one animal species that regularly travelled that route, carrying lots of viruses. That animal was the scientists themselves. In the 15 years before the pandemic, they collected over 16,000 bat viruses from all over southern China and south-east Asia and brought them a long way north to Wuhan. The nine closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 at the time of the outbreak were in the freezer of the WIV.
Coincidences do happen, but when foot and mouth broke out in the UK in 2007, just down the road from the world’s reference lab for foot-and-mouth virus, people did not think it was just a coincidence. They investigated and sure enough it was a lab leak.
The experiments they did in Wuhan were crazily risky.
Lab leaks “happen all the time”:
There have been lab accidents that caused outbreaks of influenza, anthrax and many other pathogens. In 1977, there was a global influenza pandemic caused by the trial of an experimental vaccine that had been inadequately attenuated.
In 2003-4, SARS-1 leaked from a lab at least four times, once in Singapore, once in Taiwan and at least twice in Beijing, and killed the mother of a researcher. In three of those cases, we still don’t know how the accident happened.
Bizarrely, no one can even explain why anyone would want to do these experiments. There are a million permutations of possible pandemic causing virions and we’re trying to make them one at a time, in advance, to get ahead of the game? As Ridley says” That went well, didn’t it?”.
In January, Chinese scientists published a preprint paper describing a new coronavirus that had a 100% death rate in humanized mice.
So the question of bioweapons, of reckless experiments that put us all at risk, is surely one of the most important issues of the era, unlike the exaggerated hyperbole of one more degree of global warming — yet there are no discussion panels on the nightly current affairs circus shows. And the Ministers of Science, Health, and Defence do nothing.
And the UN is as useless as it ever was.
Read it all at Spiked. Matt has waged his own war for four years to get this story out there.
Matt Ridley is a science writer and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, with Alina Chan.