Top UK scientist faces US Congress probe over ‘U-turn on Covid lab leak’
ONE of Britain’s top scientists is to be interviewed under oath by the US Congress over concerns that he was at the centre of a cover-up about the origins of Covid, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Sir Jeremy Farrar was among a group of scientists who initially claimed the coronavirus could have been man-made in a lab in the Chinese city Wuhan, where the pandemic began.
But after discussions with US officials and other leading scientists in February 2020, he changed his position, dismissing suggestions that the virus was made in a lab as a conspiracy theory. He will now be questioned over his role in ‘apparent conflicts of interest’ and ‘suppression of scientific discourse’.
Amid an investigation into the US government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic carried out for the Committee on Oversight and Reform, Sir Jeremy will be subject to an on-the-record interview about his knowledge about the origins of the disease. The committee has also demanded he provide all documents related to his discussions with senior figures on the subject.
An order sent to Sir Jeremy reads: ‘Documents in the custody of the National Institutes of Health reveal how a group of scientists, including you, initially believed Covid-19 to be man-made before reversing course and claiming otherwise following discussions with senior government health officials.’
It adds: ‘This sequence of events suggests a possible co-ordinated effort to conceal evidence pointing to a lab leak in Wuhan.’
Sir Jeremy is an expert in tropical diseases, as well as head of the Wellcome Trust, a charity that puts millions of pounds into medical research every year. He is also a former member of Britain’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage).
The US committee’s concerns about him revolve around a teleconference he led on February 1, 2020, as the emerging pandemic spread.
The call involved the two most influential scientists in America – presidential adviser Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins, as well as 11 experts including Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK Government’s chief scientific adviser. It is alleged that it was after this call that the scientists began dismissing the lab-leak hypothesis as ‘implausible’.
Sir Jeremy then signed an article in respected medical journal The Lancet that condemned ‘conspiracy theories’ alleging Covid was not natural while praising Beijing’s ‘open and transparent’ sharing of data. A new letter seen by this newspaper shows he must now share all drafts of his papers claiming the Covid leak theory was implausible with the US Congress, and all communications regarding the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some have pointed to as the source of a Covid leak, and those between him and Dr Collins and Dr Fauci.
Sir Jeremy told the MoS: ‘The scientific evidence continues to point to SARS-CoV-2 [the Covid-19 virus] crossing from animals to humans as the most likely scenario.’