Bronterre News

IT HAS been like trying to get blood from a stone, but bit by tortuous bit the truth is being dragged out about how this pandemic started.

  That it has been such a gargantuan struggle is largely down to governments, politicians and large chunks of the media deciding to resolutely look the other way, rather than act to establish Covid-19’s origins to help guard against future disasters. The consequence is a clear and present danger of the whole thing happening again. 

  This horror story has seen more than 5.4 million people worldwide die. In Wales, the virus has been implicated in the deaths of more than 6,700, with about 600,000 cases of one or other variant recorded. The resulting grief, stress and mental harm, never mind the economic damage, is incalculable.

  Maddeningly, however, attempts to achieve clarity about the roots of the pandemic are being dangerously delayed by the concealing of fact and by official cover-up. The result has been a virtual complete absence of public debate on the issue.

  When, for instance, did you last hear the subject aired on BBC news? Yes, exactly… Almost as if, oh dear, this is all rather a sensitive matter with which the government thinks the public need not be troubled, so we’re quite capable of taking a hint.

  In the context of this cosy conspiracy of silence, Whitehall’s recent refusal to release details of key email conversations between leading scientists over Covid-19’s origins stands out. Yet this was political dynamite.

  Towards the end of last year, The Mail on Sunday used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a cache of 32 emails about a secretive teleconference between British and American scientists held early in the pandemic.

  That call is at the centre of concerns that the scientific establishment tried to stifle debate on the pandemic’s beginnings, as damning new evidence emerges of US funding ties to high-risk research on bat viruses in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the first Covid cases emerged in late 2019.

  The paper requested emails on the call between, among others, Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser, and its organisers, Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust medical charity, and Anthony Fauci, a US infectious diseases expert and presidential adviser. Shockingly, when the documents were released, page after page had been blacked out by Whitehall officials. More recently, detail from the emails provided by members of the US Congress revealed that top British and US scientists agreed to label as ‘conspiracy theory’ any suggestions that Covid-19 might be linked to a laboratory incident in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Yet it emerged that these same experts in fact privately feared the new virus showed signs of lab manipulation. In public, however, they comprehensively rubbished any such suggestion.

  I asked the BBC’s outgoing head of news, Fran Unsworth, why they hadn’t touched the story. She didn’t reply.

  The Welsh government tells us its public health response to the pandemic consists of imposing restrictions that prevent or slow the spread of coronavirus, and overseeing the Welsh NHS. That such action is far too limited is shown by evidence to the Commons Science and Technology Select Committee, which heard that a laboratory leak is now the more likely origin of Covid since, despite two years of searching, an animal host to support the theory of a viral transfer between wildlife and people has never been found. Alina Chan, a specialist in gene therapy and cell engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, added that it was reasonable to conclude that Covid-19 was an engineered virus.

  Chillingly, she added: “Right now it’s not safe for people who know about the origin of the pandemic to come forward. But there is so much stored information that it will eventually come out.”

  The Welsh government should now urgently galvanise debate and challenge obfuscation surrounding Covid’s origins. Specifically, it should condemn the UK government’s blocking of public access to the crucial collection of emails so disgracefully redacted.

  Mark Drakeford is now a household name in a way that no other Wales first minister before him has been. He is therefore well placed to add to a Welsh government initiative by focusing attention on Peter Daszak, a British scientist and graduate of Bangor University, whose New York organisation funnelled US funds to research partners at Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab at the centre of the Covid conundrum. It was here that, in the five years to 2020, a multinational group of 15 scientists, backed by $600,000 of US public funds, spliced together two different coronaviruses, creating a more dangerous version, which they found had the potential to infect people, according to the journal Nature.

  Drakeford may judge, like ex-US president Barack Obama, that such experimentation is simply unacceptably risky. If he does, he should say so – very emphatically.