Covid leak silence

Three years ago, the country was on the verge of the first pandemic lockdown. The progress of Covid-19 across the globe was being watched with trepidation after its emergence in China. The authorities blamed a “wet market” in Wuhan, from which the virus was said to have crossed over into humans. The fact that the city also hosts a laboratory researching precisely these viruses was brushed over.

Now scientists are increasingly of the view that the virus may well have come from a laboratory, as are intelligence agencies. Moreover, as we report today, Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, also came to believe that an accidental leak might be the source. “Imagine there was an outbreak of a deadly new virus in Wiltshire and we shrugged off the fact that it ‘just so happened’ to be near a little place called Porton Down. We’d be laughed out of town,” he wrote.

This was toned down at the insistence of the Cabinet Office and the reference to Porton Down was removed on the grounds that its proximity to Salisbury had been used by the Russians to deny responsibility for the Novichok attack on the Skripal family five years ago. That was “entirely coincidental – as, we believe, it is that the Wuhan lab is so close to where the first covid outbreak was recorded”, the Cabinet Office said.

So the UK Government asserted last autumn that the outbreak had nothing to do with the laboratory despite growing scepticism about this and China’s withholding of the relevant information. There may be good geopolitical reasons to seek improved relations with Beijing but this was the greatest crisis to hit this country in peacetime and the public is entitled to know why it happened.