Johnson calls for move to secure labs against leaks

A LAB leak is now considered the most likely origin of the Covid pandemic “behind closed doors” of the Government, it has been claimed, after Boris Johnson signalled that security measures would be enhanced to prevent accidental escape.

On Monday, the Prime Minister told the House of Commons the UK Biosecurity Strategy would be refreshed to protect against “natural zoonosis and laboratory leaks” in a public acknowledgement of the threat from insecure research facilities.

There is mounting suspicion that Covid-19 leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology that had been experimenting on bat coronaviruses in the years before the virus first emerged in Wuhan city.

The Government has issued a call for evidence before drafting a new biosecurity strategy, which will deal with “accidental release and dual-use research of concern, where life science research is capable of being misapplied to do harm”.

Hamish de Bretton-gordon, of Magdalene College, Cambridge, who has submitted evidence for the strategy, said: “The official view (within government) is that it is as likely as anything else to have caused the pandemic.”

“Behind closed doors most people think it’s a lab leak. And they are coming round to the fact that even if they don’t agree with that, they must accept it’s likely, and they must make sure the policies are in place to stop it.”

Mr De Bretton-gordon, said current biosecurity was “in a shocking state” with little regulation or monitoring.

The comments followed the emergence of evidence that labs in China and the US were manipulating coronaviruses before the pandemic to make them more infectious to humans in socalled “gain of function” experiments.

Earlier this month, an early version of Covid that appeared to have been grown in a lab has been discovered in samples from a Chinese biotechnology firm.

The variant has mutations that bridge the gap between bat coronavirus and the earliest Wuhan strain, so it may be an ancestral version of the virus.

The samples also contain DNA from hamsters and monkeys, suggesting that the early virus may have been grown in animal cell lines.