Covid most likely came from a lab leak in China and its origins were “obviously” the subject of a cover-up by Beijing, a leading British epidemiologist has said.
Professor Tim Spector, who co-created symptom tracking app Zoe and received an OBE for his work during the pandemic response, questioned whether scientists could have manipulated the virus before it was supposedly leaked.
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that this virus emanated in China, somewhere close to Wuhan,” the King’s College London epidemiology professor told the Zoe podcast.
‘The question is: did this come from bats? Did it come from a lab that was working with this virus and manipulating it to make it grow faster? Or was it a completely artificially generated virus?
Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, central China, with different theories among scientists about whether it could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) or a wet market in the region.
There has been intense debate about the origin of the pandemic that has claimed 7 million lives worldwide and more than 200,000 in the UK.
The theory that it was a lab leak gained traction after being shared by the head of the FBI, who stated last year that the origins of the pandemic “are most likely a possible laboratory incident.”
Professor Spector said Covid has shown that laboratories around the world should be monitored more strictly and treated with the same seriousness as a nuclear threat, and warned it “could happen again in another laboratory if we are not careful.”
Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, central China, with different theories among scientists about whether it could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) or a wet market in the region.
Professor Tim Spector co-created symptom tracking app Zoe and was awarded an OBE for supporting the pandemic response with his work.
He also highlighted claims in US congressional hearings that Chinese and US laboratories had worked together to study the infectiousness of coronaviruses and how to “control or accelerate them”.
Describing a possible cover-up, he pointed to “the trail of shredded documents and the exchange of emails between the United States and China at the time.”
He added that “there was a very obvious cover-up from the beginning by various governments saying that we had to publish a report saying that this is all due to bats, so that people are not going to blame the laboratories and the scientists for maintain that credibility.” .’
‘I don’t think the idea of someone creating a virus from scratch is very easy to do. “So I think it’s more likely that it was a mistake than something deliberate, but I think it was about people working with dangerous viruses that got out of control rather than it being a plot,” he said.
The government’s pandemic adviser described it as his “personal opinion” and added that “there are opinions from all sides on this.”
In September, a major international study rejected the popular theory, claiming instead that the virus began its life in a “wet market” in Wuhan and not in a scientific experiment.
Researchers analyzed genetic samples from animals sold at Wuhan market stalls in 2019 and found traces of the Covid virus in some species.
They claimed to have identified animals that could have been responsible for its transmission to humans.
It also emerged that American and Chinese scientists attempted to create a Covid-like virus just a year before the pandemic began.
“This adds another layer to the accumulated evidence that all point to the same scenario: that infected animals were introduced to the market in mid-to-late November 2019, triggering the pandemic,” said study author Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research.
The raccoon dog, a fox-like animal common in East Asia, was suggested to be the largest carrier of the virus.
Other animals, such as masked palm civets, grizzled bamboo rats and Malayan porcupines, were also found to be carrying Covid-19 before it spread to humans.
This is not a definitive list as many of the key animal species were removed from the market before the Chinese health team arrived, said Florence Débarre of the French National Center for Scientific Research, who led the study.
Scientists note that many of the first cases in Wuhan, a city of 12 million people, were market workers.
However, supporters of the lab leak theory have been supported by the findings of Australian and American researchers who used a risk analysis tool to determine the chances that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was of “unnatural” origin. ” or “natural.”
It found that Covid had a high probability of having a “non-natural” origin, although the researchers cautioned this by saying that the “risk assessment cannot prove the origin of (Covid), but shows that the possibility of a laboratory origin does not can be easily dismissed.” .’
It also emerged that American and Chinese scientists attempted to create a Covid-like virus just a year before the pandemic began.
The records, obtained through freedom of information requests in December 2023, laid out a plan to “engineer spike proteins” to infect human cells that would then be “inserted into the backbones of SARS-Covid” at the WIV in December 2018. .
This photo taken on April 15, 2020 shows vendors wearing face masks as they offer prawns for sale at Wuhan Baishazhou Market in Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province.
The proposal was made by EcoHealth Alliance, a New York nonprofit that channels U.S. government grants abroad to fund these types of experiments.
Ultimately, the US Department of Defense denied the request, but critics say the plans laid out in the proposal served as a “blueprint” for how to create Covid.
Speaking about the implications of the study, Dr Raina MacIntyre, an Australian biosafety expert, told Daily Mail Australia: “For policy, this (study) is important because we have more control over preventing unnatural outbreaks, many of which which arise from simple human error or inadequate biosecurity”. .
“Poor biosafety procedures have been documented in bat sampling and at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but laboratory accidents are common around the world.”