Patrick Vallance loves to pontificate on the importance of transparency in science, peppering his speeches and interviews with grandiose statements about how openness is so fundamental to understanding our world and making progress.
His words carry great weight as one of the country’s most influential scientists. He was, after all, chief scientific adviser to the government during the pandemic and has now been elevated to the House of Lords and appointed as science minister.
As this owlish character says so rightly, ‘openness is one of the guiding principles of science’ – and, as new evidence emerges, furthering our understanding of the world, transparency allows scientists to change their mind freely.
‘That is an exciting part of progress,’ he told the BBC. ‘For a politician that feels like a U-turn. This is not a U-turn – it is new evidence that gives you a new position.’
Yet perhaps his lordship sees himself now as a politician rather than a scientist.
For how else to explain his abandonment of oft-stated principles regarding one of the most important scientific issues facing the world: the origin of a pandemic that led to 20 million excess deaths and economic devastation around the planet?
The harsh truth is that Vallance now looks like a grubby elitist hypocrite – another arrogant politician contemptuous of the taxpayers funding his salary as he dodges questions over a sordid cover-up that stains science.
As I reported in The MoS last month, Vallance has serious questions to answer over his involvement in a multinational group of scientists that stifled debate on Covid origins and helped undermine public faith in their profession during the pandemic.
Sir Patrick Vallance was chief scientific adviser to the government during the pandemic and has now been elevated to the House of Lords and appointed as science minister
A police officer standing guard outside the Huanan Seafood Wholesale market, where the coronavirus was detected, in Wuhan
They pushed a debunked idea that Covid-19 can be traced to a market selling wild animals in the Chinese city of Wuhan while helping brand dissidents who refused to rule out the lab leak theory as ‘conspiracy theorists’ – assisted by supine science journals, weak politicians and a patsy media cowed by their supposed expertise.
‘As more evidence emerges to suggest the heads of Western funding bodies – in grim alliance with the Chinese dictatorship –tried to dupe the public over Covid-19’s origins, his position looks untenable,’ I wrote.
Given the need for more clarity on such a seismic issue, I sent Vallance 20 detailed questions over the origins of Sars-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid – and his involvement in the clandestine group that tried to stifle debate on a lab leak.
I asked him to explain his statement that ‘from all the evidence I have seen’ Covid was a zoonotic disease (one that can be transmitted from animals to humans).
He has, after all, dismissed the hypothesis that the virus might have escaped a lab after being engineered by scientists, claiming that its biology ‘does not look like that’ and insisting that the concept of a designed virus was ‘very, very, very unlikely’.
Yet we know Vallance himself informed intelligence agencies in the early weeks of the pandemic over suspicions that the virus might have come from a laboratory.
Then he helped quash such concerns, as a part of a secretive group led by former US presidential adviser Anthony Fauci and Sir Jeremy Farrar, who was then the director of Europe’s biggest medical research charity, the Wellcome Trust, and is now chief scientist at the widely-discredited World Health Organisation.
They pushed a now notorious statement known as the ‘Proximal Origin’ article that refuted the origin of Sars-CoV-2 being linked to ‘any laboratory-based scenario’ in Nature Medicine and in a letter to The Lancet attacking ‘conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin’.
Sir Vallance gave evidence at the UK Covid-19 Inquiry in 2023
Mr Vallance has dismissed the hypothesis that the virus might have escaped a lab after being engineered by scientists
So, given his publicly-stated view on the importance of scientific openness and the essential need to share methodology – not to mention his taxpayer-funded post as science minister – it seemed fair to ask him to explain his actions. These are, after all, issues of immense global significance.
Recent reports suggest that at the beginning of the pandemic, the BND – Germany’s foreign intelligence agency – believed there was at least an 80 per cent chance that Sars-CoV-2 leaked from a Chinese lab.
Their findings, though, were covered up by former chancellor Angela Merkel’s team.
The CIA now concurs that it is ‘more likely’ to have leaked from a Wuhan lab than to have had a natural origin, joining the FBI and the US’s Department of Energy, which runs advanced biology labs, in adopting this position.
Many scientists have shifted their view also following a welter of circumstantial evidence pointing towards a possible lab leak. Yet those backing the idea that it originated in wild animals have failed to find a species that transmitted the disease from bats to humans, despite an intensive search by Chinese authorities. Given the disgraceful refusal of the Communist dictatorship to share key data on the origin of the virus, one would think that Vallance – the minister who preaches about scientific transparency – would show his evidence or explain his stance.
But instead of a fascinating exposition of his viewpoint – let alone any admission that his views might have altered – I was sent just a couple of bland lines from a spokesman on the need to find Covid’s origins to help prevent and prepare for future pandemics.
His team pointed me again towards a cosy chat Vallance had on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme earlier this month in which he claimed to have been clear from the start of the pandemic that the virus could have been designed, escaped from a lab or spilled over naturally from animals. Yet the minister insisted again that a designed virus was ‘much less likely for a number of biological reasons’ and said that a natural spillover from animal to human ‘is still probably the most likely’.
He was not challenged, of course, by the genial host Evan Davis, who failed to ask his guest to explain those ‘biological reasons’ or detail his evidence for spillover. Yet, as I reported in The MoS, Robert Redfield – a world-renowned virologist who headed the key US public health body when the pandemic erupted – told me that he is now ‘100 per cent’ convinced Covid resulted from bat virus researchers becoming infected at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The CIA now concurs that the virus is ‘more likely’ to have leaked from a Wuhan lab than to have had a natural origin
Yet you do not have to be a top scientist to see the glaring coincidence that Covid emerged in a city hosting a secretive laboratory with the world’s biggest repository of bat coronaviruses.
That the Institute took its database offline shortly before the pandemic was detected, had known safety concerns and was carrying out risky research to boost infectivity of coronaviruses, only emboldens the view that Covid might have been ‘Made in China’, which is shared by the majority of the public but conspicuously not by our science minister.
Yet Lord Vallance shamefully hides behind his officials and loftily declines to set out his alternative stance.
Given his extraordinary hypocrisy, is it any wonder that the public is losing faith in both his professions of science and politics?
