Lord Vallance is facing questions over a controversial meeting which led to the Covid Chinese ‘lab leak’ theory being dismissed.
Patrick Vallance, the government’s chief scientific adviser during the pandemic, took part in a multinational teleconference in February 2020, after which it is alleged scientists began dismissing the lab-leak hypothesis as implausible.
The meeting is in the spotlight again after Robert Redfield, the infectious diseases expert who headed the key US public health body when the pandemic erupted, accused American and British intelligence agencies of orchestrating a clandestine campaign to shut down concerns over a possible laboratory leak in China.
Where Covid came from is a hotly contested topic with a lab leak origin, once dismissed as a conspiracy theory, having gained traction.
Former minister Steve Baker said Lord Vallance needed to be ‘fully transparent’ about the meeting.
He said: ‘Now as a minister he should be fully transparent about what he knew and why he chose to be among those who avoided inconvenient questions.’
Mr Redfield, a world-renowned virologist, told the Mail on Sunday he is now ‘100 per cent’ convinced that Covid-19 was the result of scientists becoming infected while carrying out high-risk experiments to boost the infectivity of bat viruses amid low biosecurity in laboratories in the city of Wuhan.
Mr Redfield fears security services secretly ‘pulled a lot of the strings’ to protect their agents inside China’s military-linked laboratories and that exposing the leak would also bring too much scrutiny down on the lab and potentially expose active operatives.
Former Chief Scientific Adviser Lord Vallance (pictured) took part in a multinational teleconference in February 2020, after which it is alleged scientists began dismissing the lab-leak hypothesis as implausible
The origins of the Covid pandemic remain a hotly contested topic, with the lab leak origin, once dismissed as a conspiracy theory, having gained traction (file image of a laboratory in Wuhan)
He believes that Anthony Fauci, former presidential adviser and influential U.S. doctor, worked with the heads of US and UK research funding bodies to push the theory of natural transmission from animals on sale in the Wuhan wet market to humans.
The purpose, he claims, was to cover up their support for controversial ‘gain-of-function’ research, which is when organisms are genetically altered in a controlled environment to help better predict emerging infectious diseases, a practice which was banned in the US between 2014-2017.
He said any dissenting scientists were labelled as conspiracy theorists.
Mr Redfield said he was furious to find out he had not been invited to the ‘in total confidence’ teleconference, convened by Fauci, of prominent scientists on February 1 2020.
Sir Jeremy Farrar, now the WHO’s chief scientist but who was then boss of the London-based Wellcome Trust, and Lord Vallance, who was appointed science minister last year, were on the call.
The teleconference led to the publication of a hugely influential commentary in Nature Medicine in March 2020, in which five prominent scientists concluded they did not believe ‘any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible’.
Racoon dogs and unknown birds at the Huanan seafood wholesale market. Lord Vallance told a House of Commons committee in May 2023 that he believed Sars-CoV-2 was ‘most likely’ to have spilled over naturally from bats
Mr Redfield said the meeting had the effect of stifling debate on the origin of covid: ‘They classified people like me as conspirators by saying there is no evidence the virus came from a lab. But there were two hypotheses. And five years later there is absolutely no data that supports spillover and plenty of data that supports lab leak.’
Mr Redfield suggested the ‘cover up’ over the origin stemmed from a desire to support gain of function research.
This is hugely controversial field of research that can involve purposely manipulating pathogens to make them more dangerous.
In theory, it can help scientists get a head start on developing treatments for viruses that could naturally evolve to become deadlier.
But critics of the technique warn that it poses a massive risk to human health – if the pathogens ever escape.
Sir Jeremy was among a group of scientists who initially claimed the coronavirus could have been man-made in a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the pandemic began.
But after the meeting in February changed his position, dismissing suggestions that the virus was made in a lab as a conspiracy theory.
Lord Vallance told a House of Commons committee in May 2023 that he believed Sars-CoV-2 was ‘most likely’ to have spilled over naturally from bats.
A security officer removing journalists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology after a WHO team arrived for a field visit in February 2021
He added that he believed gain-of-function research to be ‘incredibly important’ for science.
A government spokesperson said: ‘Understanding how COVID-19 originated and spread will help us better prevent and prepare for future pandemics.
‘The UK continues to support the World Health Organization in its ongoing expert study of the origins of COVID-19 and seeks a robust, transparent, and science-led review.’
Lord Vallance did not respond to a request for comment.
