Five years ago, as our country reeled under the Covid-19 pandemic, the scientific interventions of Patrick Vallance made him a household name.
As the Government’s chief scientific adviser, he played a pivotal role in shaping Britain’s response to the pandemic, flanking ministers at Downing Street news conferences as they shut down the country and forced citizens to stay at home.
His calmness reassured Britons amid the most devastating public health crisis for a century.
Diary extracts later given to the Covid Inquiry revealed Lord Vallance’s scathing private criticism of Tory politicians, whom he had accused of being ‘useless’ and ‘cherry-picking’ data to support their actions during the pandemic.
But he was welcomed back into Whitehall after last year’s election, with Sir Keir Starmer handing him a peerage and a senior Government post as science minister.
Some hailed Vallance’s appointment as a stroke of genius, given his undoubted expertise and wide-ranging experience as an academic, medical researcher and senior executive at global pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline.
But Starmer’s move was far from smart. For Vallance’s appointment was politically foolish and deeply alarming given his role in a shocking conspiracy that has undermined public trust in the scientific community, which The Mail on Sunday has been unravelling for five years.
Indeed, 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.
Vallance has set out with admirable clarity how science is reliant on debate, evidence and ‘open’ methodology. ‘It needs to be rigorous. It needs to be transparent,’ he told a conference just three years ago. And at the height of the pandemic, as the global death toll mounted, he declared rightly that ‘openness is one of the guiding principles of science’.
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave a press conference on the ongoing situation with the coronavirus pandemic with chief medical officer Chris Whitty (left) and Chief scientific officer Sir Patrick Vallance (right) in 2020
While Vallance has admitted that establishing the virus’s true origins is vital to protecting the planet from future pandemics, the investigation into its cause has been stymied by a disturbing trail of wilful deceit and state secrecy
The Mail on Sunday was the first newspaper to raise fears that Covid could have originated with a lab leak and highlight ties to US funders
How different when it comes to examining his own role in a crucial scientific quest – the search to discover the cause of the Covid pandemic which erupted in China, leading to at least 20 million excess deaths and crippling global economies. Certainly, ‘openness’ is the last word that comes to mind.
While Vallance has admitted that establishing the virus’s true origins is vital to protecting the planet from future pandemics, the investigation into its cause has been stymied by a disturbing trail of wilful deceit and state secrecy.
When questioned on this issue by MPs just two years ago, Vallance firmly dismissed the hypothesis that Sars-CoV-2 – the virus that causes Covid – might have escaped after being engineered in a lab, claiming that its biology ‘does not look like that’. He insisted that the concept of a designed virus was ‘very, very, very unlikely’.
It was a strangely emphatic stance given some unusual features of the disease that had sparked concerns among other experts. And indeed, when Covid erupted in a city that was home to a secretive laboratory with the world’s biggest repository of bat coronaviruses – which took its database offline shortly before the pandemic was detected, had known safety concerns and was conducting risky research that boosted the infectivity of coronaviruses.
The Mail on Sunday was the first newspaper to raise fears that Covid could have originated with a lab leak and highlight ties to US funders. Yet Vallance insisted that, ‘from all the evidence I have seen’, Covid was a zoonotic disease – one that can be transmitted from animals to humans. He told MPs it was ‘most likely’ that transmission had taken place at Wuhan’s wet markets where wild animals were on sale. When pressed further, he replied dismissively that he had joined some discussions about the virus’s origins in early 2020 but that he was not interested in this ‘rather secondary issue’.
Yet evidence has emerged – through leaks, US Congressional investigations, books and a barrage of Freedom of Information inquiries – that suggests Vallance had been deeply involved in top-level discussions around its cause.
Indeed, as scientists began to grapple with this strange new disease rocketing around the world, it was Vallance who informed Britain’s intelligence agencies about strong suspicions the virus had come out of a laboratory.
This snippet was disclosed in Spike, the 2021 book by Sir Jeremy Farrar, a fellow member of the Government’s pandemic advisory group who was then the director of Europe’s biggest medical research charity, the Wellcome Trust. He is now the chief scientist at the World Health Organisation (WHO), the body which floundered so woefully during the crisis.
Vallance insisted that Covid was ‘most likely’ that transmission had taken place at Wuhan’s wet markets where wild animals were on sale. Above, researchers work in a lab of Wuhan Institute of Virology
‘Gain-of-function’ experiments that boost the infectivity of diseases to give scientists insights into their behaviour, was being carried out on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, aided by US cash, amid shockingly low biosecurity
The P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province. The Chinese biosafety laboratory was accused by top US officials of being at the origin of the coronavirus pandemic, as researchers investigate viruses that live in bats
Then on February 1, 2020, Vallance joined a teleconference on the virus’s origins led by Farrar in conjunction with former US presidential adviser Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, then head of the National Institutes of Health, the world’s biggest biomedical research funding agency.
Like Vallance, these influential figures, who all held huge control over research funding, were firm supporters of controversial ‘gain-of-function’ experiments. These boost the infectivity of diseases to give scientists insights into their behaviour, supposedly to help safeguard the world against future epidemics. Such research was being carried out on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, aided by US cash, amid shockingly low biosecurity.
Despite the fears of several participants – including Farrar – that the virus had originated in a laboratory, the discussion led to a strategy that dismissed the idea of a lab leak and branded its proponents ‘conspiracy theorists’. This approach proved effective at stifling debate and promoted the now debunked wet-market theory – then aided by patsy science journals, weak politicians and supine media.
At the core of this strategy was an influential article, published in the journal Nature Medicine a month later, that refuted the origin being linked to ‘any laboratory-based scenario’. Written by four of the call participants and one additional expert, it has been accessed online more than six million times and was even cited by Fauci in the White House.
Yet it has emerged that the statement was directed by Farrar. Indeed, the lead author had admitted in private messages sent to fellow authors on the Slack platform that a lab link was ‘so friggin’ likely’ and even discussed the possibility of genetic engineering one month after publication.
When the BBC asked about his involvement, Vallance admitted that he had attended ‘a meeting organised by other people’ that led to a scientific paper on the virus’s origins. But he insisted that it was not part of his role to investigate this ‘crucially important’ issue.
Yet released emails suggest Vallance had joined a preparatory call with Farrar and Fauci two days before the key teleconference. And after the discussion – which the 13 participants were told was being held ‘in total confidence’ – Farrar asked Vallance to dial straight back in to join him, Fauci, Collins and his Wellcome Trust deputy for a private follow-up conversation.
One week later, an email from Farrar to Victor Dzau, head of the US National Academy of Medicine, stated that ‘Tony, Patrick, myself and a close-knit group have been looking at [the origins issue] for the last ten days and might have some information to share’.
Indeed, as scientists began to grapple with this strange new disease rocketing around the world, it was Vallance who informed Britain’s intelligence agencies about strong suspicions the virus had come out of a laboratory
When I sought to obtain Vallance’s emails, minutes and notes on this issue under the pathetically weak British Freedom of Information rules, I was sent 32 emails with almost every word blacked out by his officials. Such state secrecy exposes the hypocrisy of Vallance’s talk about transparency. It is also contemptuous towards British taxpayers and a world that must understand the pandemic’s cause to guard against future catastrophes.
I also attempted to obtain emails exchanged by Andrew Rambaut, an evolutionary biologist at Edinburgh University, who was one of the Nature Medicine authors. I was rebuffed by his bosses after 27 months and an appeal on the grounds that their release might ‘endanger the physical or mental health or safety of an individual’.
Bear in mind that Rambaut had told his fellow authors in messages that ‘the truth is never going to come out (if escape is the truth)’ as they prepared the Nature Medicine statement. ‘Once you lose the market as the origin, all bets are off,’ he added ominously.
Earlier this month, The Mail on Sunday published my interview with Robert Redfield, who headed the key US public health body when the pandemic erupted.
He accused Fauci of orchestrating a cabal of experts to push a debunked theory of zoonotic spillover. Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, claimed that the group sought to distract focus from US federal funding for gain-of-function research – which had been banned in America between 2014 and 2017 – and called the wet market ‘a red herring.’ The world-renowned virologist – who was furious at being excluded from the secret discussions – said he is now ‘100 per cent’ convinced Covid-19 was the result of bat virus researchers becoming infected at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Having seen much of the US intelligence on this issue, he also claimed that Western security services had colluded in the cover-up to protect agents inside China’s military-linked laboratories.
Redfield’s statements were reinforced by explosive revelations in the MoS last weekend that former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove had told Downing Street early in the pandemic that the virus was engineered in Wuhan – and that Vallance had allegedly crushed his claim.
Vallance declined to respond directly to questions from this newspaper. His spokesperson pointed to an interview on BBC Radio 4 last week in which the minister was asked if he was too quick to dismiss the lab leak theory.
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 was very clear right from the beginning that there were three real possibilities. One is that it was a designed virus. Second is that it was a natural virus that got into a lab and leaked from a lab, and the third is that it was a natural virus that spilled over from animals, which has been the normal thing in previous pandemics and is still probably the most likely of those three possibilities. But all three are possible.’
Meanwhile, in Germany, the parliamentary oversights committee has called on the government to share the findings of their spy agency after claims that former chancellor Angela Merkel covered up a bombshell report suggesting an 80 to 95 per cent certainty of a lab leak. This report was only shared with US intelligence and a handful of scientists in December.
The following month, America’s CIA said Covid is ‘more likely’ to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have had a natural origin, joining the FBI and Department of Energy, which runs advanced biology labs, in adopting this view.
The German revelations have sparked a political furore, and two of the nation’s most prominent experts have shifted their stance on the issue. ‘We must now seriously consider that the lab leak hypothesis is at least as credible as a natural spillover,’ said Lothar Weiler, who headed their main public health body during the pandemic.
Epidemiologist Alexander Kekule, one of Europe’s top biosecurity experts, said he now believes it is ‘more likely’ the virus came from a lab. ‘If Sars-CoV-2 was manipulated or studied in a laboratory, it could explain its unusual features,’ he said. Kekule argued that the market theory was ‘definitely a fabricated story’ and complained that a ‘group of scientists condemned the laboratory theory as a “conspiracy theory” which did a disservice to serious causal research’.
He added: ‘It has long been known that China does not properly control its biolabs and there have already been several accidental virus outbreaks from labs there.’ Earlier this year there was an intriguing interview with Germany’s most prominent virologist – who has supported the wet market line – in which he called for China to prove the disease really came from animals. Speaking to the Die Tageszeitung newspaper, Christian Drosten confessed: ‘The more time passes, the more sceptical I become.’
The professor’s words were highly significant since he advised both Germany and the European Union on the pandemic – and was among the group of scientists participating in the February 2020 teleconference led by Farrar and Fauci.
He was also one of 27 experts – alongside Farrar – who signed a notorious Lancet letter drafted days after the meeting that praised China’s ‘rapid, open and transparent sharing of data’ and attacked ‘conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin’. The letter was later found to have been organised by British zoologist Peter Daszak, who ran the New York-based non-profit organisation EcoHealth Alliance, which channelled US taxpayer dollars to Wuhan scientists.
America’s CIA said Covid is ‘more likely’ to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have had a natural origin, joining the FBI and Department of Energy, which runs advanced biology labs, in adopting this view
Last week, emails emerged from Daszak suggesting that he had submitted the letter to the influential journal at Farrar’s request – and that they even tried to get it signed by Tedros Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the WHO.
Drosten also pointed to the shocking discovery that Wuhan scientists and EcoHealth Alliance had sought US defence cash in 2018 to create viruses containing the defining feature of Sars-CoV-2: the spiked ‘furin cleavage site’ that helps the virus bind so effectively to cells in human tissues and is not found on hundreds of the most similar coronaviruses.
The scientists’ submission for funding was rejected as too risky – but its top bat researcher refused to reply when asked if they had pushed ahead regardless. ‘The public is rightly asking if Chinese scientists might have worked on it anyway,’ Drosten said. ‘I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling.’
These shifts underscore how the lab leak case has grown stronger with each new slice of evidence that comes to light – while those backing the theory that it originated in wild animals have failed to find a species that transmitted the disease from bats to humans. This comes despite an intensive search by Chinese authorities, who have tested samples from at least 80,000 animals.
The saga exposes two entwined issues. There is the ongoing search for the virus’s origin, which remains unproven despite the substantial body of evidence suggesting it escaped from a lab.
But there is also the disturbing cover-up conspiracy seemingly led by the Chinese dictatorship in collusion with Western scientists, including a man now back at the heart of Britain’s Government.
As Vallance rightly points out, science should be rigorous and transparent. So he needs to come clean on his own role in this alarming scandal – or get out of government given his seemingly shameful failure to live up to his own fine words.
