UK government considering Wuhan lab leak after past claims of ‘coincidence’

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The UK government has said it is now actively considering the possibility that China’s coronavirus crisis was the result of a Wuhan lab leak after reports showed the Cabinet Office previously censored references to the theory.

Earlier this week it was revealed that the memoir of pandemic-era health secretary Matt Hancock had been stripped of mentions of his belief that COVID-19 may well have emerged from the Institute of Virology of Wuhan by the UK government’s Cabinet Office, which has the right to scrutinize the books of senior government officials before they are published to prevent the disclosure of potentially sensitive information.

“It’s just too much of a coincidence that the pandemic started in the same town as the lab, which – by the way – is a 40-minute drive from the wet market originally linked to the outbreak,” Hancock had written. in one of his references to a possible lab leak in the original version of his book.

Justifying the removal of the comment about the former health secretary’s lab leak, the Cabinet Office said the government’s position was that the Wuhan lab’s proximity to the original outbreak was “entirely coincidental” – despite Prominent figures such as former MI6 director Sir Richard Dearlove have long backed the idea and warned that the government should “rethink how it deals with its relations with China”.

In a slight dismissal of the apparent bowing down to the communist government in Beijing, Downing Street said in a statement on Friday that there were “still questions to be answered about the origin and spread of Covid-19”.

“The UK wants to see a robust, transparent and science-based review and believes all possibilities remain on the table until it is concluded,” the spokesperson said in comments reported by The telegraph.

This stems from the fact that the Department of Energy and the FBI in the United States seem to admit that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was probably the point of origin of the virus.

Speaking last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray said: “[T]he FBI has for some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.

At the height of China’s virus crisis, health officials, establishment media and Silicon Valley all attempted to shut down the conversation surrounding the lab leak theory, calling it a conspiracy theory. after then-President Donald Trump pointed to the possibility that the Wuhan lab was the source of the pandemic.

Dr Anthony Fauci in the US was an early critic of the theory, saying in May 2020 that “the best evidence shows that the virus causing the pandemic was not made in a lab in China”.

In Britain, the laboratory leak hypothesis was also branded a “conspiracy theory” by a group of 27 scientists in a letter published in the prestigious English medical journal. The Lancet in March 2020.

It would later be alleged that 26 of the 27 scientists who signed the letter had conflicts of interest, either directly related to the Wuhan lab or related to it through researchers and funders linked to the facility.

the infamous Lancet letter was organized by none other than British zoologist Dr Peter Daszak, who was then forced to admit his own conflict of interest, given that he is chairman of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance – an NGO who directly funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology after receiving US taxpayer money from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) then headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci.

A report by The Intercept last year alleged that the US government provided EcoHealth Alliance with $3.1 million in funding, including $599,000 that went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to study how to modify the bat coronaviruses in order to increase their ability to infect humans, calling into question Dr. Faucci’s claims that his agency did not fund so-called gain-of-function research.

Dr Daszak was later part of the team of World Health Organization investigators who examined the lab and concluded there was “no evidence” of a leak.

However, the investigation relied heavily on information provided by Chinese researchers at the lab, and the WHO team did not have access to hard evidence proving that the virus did not exist in the lab. pre-pandemic – meaning they were basically forced to take the word of communist officials to come to their conclusion.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

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