Matt Ridley: The shameless cover up of the lab leak theory

The more I think about it the more enraged it makes me. Back in late November, senior Tory minister Michael Gove was slapped down by the UK Covid inquiry’s head counsel, Hugo Keith, for raising the issue of where the virus originated. ‘There is a significant body of judgement that believes that the virus itself was man-made, and that presents challenges as well’, Gove said.

Gove was, I think, making the point that the question of Covid’s origins ought to matter to the inquiry. That’s because a laboratory-derived virus, being already trained on human cells, is bound to spread faster than one that has just jumped from an animal. And SARS‑CoV‑2 was unusually infectious for a pathogen new to the human species.

Matt Ridley: Virology poses a far greater threat to the world than AI

Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’

Matt Ridley: Why Did Scientists Suppress The Lab-Leak Theory?

In private, they said it was plausible. In public, they called it a conspiracy theory.

In August 2007 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth virus on a farm in Surrey. It was a few miles from the world’s leading reference laboratory for identifying outbreaks of foot and mouth. Nobody thought this was a coincidence and sure enough a leaking pipe at the laboratory was soon found to be the source: a drainage contractor had worked at the lab and then at the farm.

In December 2019 there was an outbreak in China of a novel bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus a few miles from the world’s leading laboratory for collecting, studying and manipulating novel bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. We were assured by leading scientists in China, the US and the UK that this really was a coincidence, even when the nine closest relatives of the new virus turned up in the freezer of the laboratory in question, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.