According to reports, experts in the United Kingdom aided in shutting down covid lab leak theory back in 2020. The article “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2,” published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, stated that the pandemic was triggered by a natural breakout event, and was crucial in dampening debate about the virus’s origins.
However, recently declassified emails from early 2020 show that the authors engaged in long talks with specialists, including Sir Patrick Vallance and Sir Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, in the weeks before publication. Experts were cautioned in those email conversations that the odd traits identified in Covid-19 may have developed in both lab or wild animals.
They were also cautioned that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been doing research on bat coronaviruses at risky biosafety levels. However, by the time the article was published, all mention of Wuhan’s biosecurity issues had been omitted, and the authors contended that lab proliferation of the virus was doubtful.
Since the article’s publication, questions have been raised about its drafting and composition. Professor Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, the paper’s primary author, had previously warned colleagues that elements of the virus appeared to have been produced in a lab. The article, however, made no mention of this.
Latest revelations indicate that a few of the authors were concerned about a lab leak and brought up their concerns in the weeks leading up to the publication with senior scientists including Sir Patrick Vallance and Sir Jeremy. The virus would look the same whether it evolved spontaneously or in lab mice through a procedure called “serial passaging,” one of the authors even agreed in an email thread.
Dr Robert Garry of Tulane University noted in an email on February 8, 2020, that identical effects had been discovered when avian flu was passed on to experimental chicks. However, by the time the article was published, the writers had ruled out the idea.
Many scientists now think that a lab leak is very likely, however, the majority of the supporting data was discovered by hackers and rogue scientists who were labelled conspiracy theorists for questioning the mainstream version. According to the most recent email revelations, experts who discounted a lab leak admitted amongst themselves that it was likely.
Professor Edward Holmes, one of the contributors to the Nature Medicine article from the University of Sydney, admitted in an email on February 8 that many individuals suspected the virus had slipped from the Wuhan facility. “Ever since this outbreak started there have been suggestions that the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab, if only because of the coincidence of where the outbreak occurred and the location of the lab. I do a lot of work in China and I can tell you a lot of people there believe this and believe they are being lied to,” Holmes said.
Role of US scientists
The email exchange also included Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), United States, which funded research at the Wuhan institute.
In 2021, OpIndia reported how several researchers, US government officials, and intelligence officials all wanted to look into the role played by the Chinese lab, but Dr Fauci and others dissuaded them because they had a significant stake in the outcome because they helped get the US government to fund the virus study at the Wuhan research facility.
Indian scientists had flagged ‘unnatural insertions’ in the COVID-19 genome
In January 2021, researchers from IIT Delhi’s Kusuma School of Biological Sciences and Delhi University’s Acharya Narendra Dev College published a research paper in which they discovered that the spike glycoprotein (S) of SARS-CoV-2 had four insertions that were not found in any other Coronavirus, and the insertions were similar to those found in HIV virus. The investigation suggested the likelihood that SARS-CoV-2 was bioengineered from existing Coronavirus and HIV viruses.
The study, titled “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag,” evaluated all of the coronavirus sequences available in the NCBI viral genome database. The analysis by the Indian scientists established that the virus underwent “unconventional evolution,” even if it did not prove that it was created in a lab. The scientific paper thus advised more investigation into the virus’s origin.
The research paper’s preprint was published on bioRxiv on January 31, 2020, however, it was withdrawn by the authors on February 2. The notice of withdrawal said that they intended to amend it in response to suggestions made by the academic community regarding their technical approach and interpretations of the results.
Although the theory of a lab leak was widely accepted in the early stages of the pandemic, the US government and a sizable percentage of the scientific community rejected it. Former American President Donald Trump frequently brought up the matter, but by February 19, 2020, when The Lancet published a statement completely discounting the chance that the virus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the idea had already been completely dismissed. Any meaningful investigation into the origin of the virus was all but eliminated by the statement signed by 27 experts and published by such a reputable medical journal since it completely shut down one aspect of the inquiry.
