Security officials censored a submission to the Covid Inquiry which highlighted the failure of intelligence agents to gather evidence which points to the virus having originated in a laboratory in Wuhan.
The heavily criticised £200 million inquiry by Baroness Hallett stifled any discussion of the origins of Covid, with lawyers shutting down ex Cabinet Minister Michael Gove when he tried to tell them ‘a significant body of judgment’ believed the virus was man-made.
Last week, Lord Gove, who was at the heart of the Government’s response to the crisis, publicly reasserted that the view of ‘most intelligence agencies’ was that the virus had leaked after being super-charged by Chinese scientists to become ultra-infectious.
Now Whitehall sources have revealed that Dominic Cummings’s evidence to the inquiry was redacted by the security services to remove criticism of the fact that MI6 and MI5 had falsely dismissed the ‘lab leak’ hypothesis as a ‘conspiracy theory’.
In his censored evidence, Mr Cummings wrote: ‘The PM and I were told categorically that, considering all intelligence, including the most highly classified, the agencies were extremely confident that the “lab leak” hypothesis could be ruled out as, effectively, a conspiracy theory without scientific basis.
‘I pushed on this issue because I was worried this was a mistake and some serious people were publicly arguing the opposite.’
The blacked-out submission went on: ‘We now know that many scientists working in the UK and US systems were emailing each other saying that they thought a lab leak was the most likely cause.
‘The reasons for this overconfidence among the intelligence community – and, potentially, a decision somewhere… not to explore ongoing debates with the PM – should be properly explored.’
Intelligence agents failed to gather evidence which points to the virus having originated in a laboratory in Wuhan
In April 2020, two weeks into the first lockdown, The Mail on Sunday became the first media outlet in the world to report the ‘lab leak’ theory, revealing that the Government’s Cobra committee had been told Covid could have come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Last night, former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith said: ‘This is the biggest cover-up known to man. There is no way the agencies were as ignorant as they claimed.
‘They accepted Chinese assurances that they had the pandemic under control and didn’t want to jeopardise that. But they didn’t have it under control, which is why it turned out to be such as disaster.’
Earlier this year, this newspaper revealed that a former spy chief submitted a secret dossier to No 10 early in the pandemic reporting that the virus had originated with a leak from a Wuhan facility.
But Lord Vallance, the science minister who was the Government’s chief scientific adviser at the time, is said by sources to have ignored the report – possibly for fear of offending the Chinese or jeopardising research funding from Beijing.
A classified dossier compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, was passed to then Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the start of the outbreak in March 2020, which stated: ‘It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.’
The file, marked ‘Secret – Recipient’s Eyes Only’ argued that Beijing was pushing a fake narrative that the virus had originated in an animal market.
The dossier, compiled by eminent academics and intelligence experts, said China retrospectively manipulated viral samples to give credence to the deception.
The heavily criticised £200million inquiry by Baroness Hallett (pictured) stifled any discussion of the origins of Covid
A source close to Mr Johnson pointed the finger at Lord Vallance for rubbishing the lab-leak theory.
The source said: ‘Boris repeatedly asked the [intelligence] agencies to do more work on the origins of Covid.
‘It struck him as simply too much of a coincidence that a mutant Covid virus appeared in a city that just happened to possess one of the only labs in the world that engineered mutant Covid viruses.
‘Looking back, he now wonders why the scientists and the agencies were so emphatic.’
In America, the CIA has concluded a leak is the most likely explanation for the pandemic.
Still no one will point the finger at real villains of this grisly saga
By Ian Birrell
I recently met a friend tormented by long Covid. A brilliant and brave journalist, Jose’s life has been devastated by the disease that emerged six years ago from China, leaving him exhausted by the simplest daily tasks.
He is one of an estimated 400 million sufferers around the world struggling with this debilitating condition after being struck by the novel coronavirus that killed millions, shut down much of the world and shattered economies.
As Jose’s fight shows, this disease still reverberates round our planet after the pandemic that impacted on so many aspects of life, from health systems, schools and society through to trust in democratic politicians and science.
Now we have the second of ten reports by the £192 million Covid inquiry. It is a damning verdict on the lamentable political leadership and dysfunctional system of government that plagues our country and inflamed the pandemic.
Yet this costly, overblown and slothful inquiry deliberately ducks the central question we need to answer to avoid another pandemic: what was the origin of the disease that ravaged the world?
There is such stifling official silence and fear of the truth that when Lord Gove mentioned at the inquiry that ‘a significant body of judgment’ believed Covid ‘was man-made’, he was shut down by a lawyer for straying into the ‘somewhat divisive issue’ of origins.
Two weeks into the first lockdown, The Mail on Sunday became the first media outlet in the world to report the ‘lab leak’ theory
Yet as Gove told the BBC last week, it is now the view of most intelligence agencies that the virus leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan – and this raises deep questions over our relationship with a callous regime that covered up the disease’s outbreak.
He is right. Imagine if such global disruption and so many deaths had been caused by a nuclear leak. Yet Britain, like every other country, seems content to brush aside the cause of the most devastating public health disaster for a century, as it kowtows to a bullying Communist dictatorship.
The Mail on Sunday led the way in exposing the Covid cover-up by the Chinese regime, which was carrying out high-risk ‘gain of function’ experiments into bat coronaviruses amid shockingly low levels of biosecurity at a secretive Wuhan lab.
We revealed how this duplicity was assisted by a shameful cabal of Western scientific leaders who helped fund these dangerous experiments – then smeared those discussing the lab leak concept as conspiracy theorists, cranks and racists. We do not have a definitive verdict on Covid’s origins yet. The case is not closed. But the lab leak theory has grown stronger with each crumb of evidence while the alternative idea it crossed over from animals has failed to find any firm proof.
Early in the pandemic, we saw how Beijing’s goons covered up the late 2019 emergence of a new virus in Wuhan by silencing medical whistle-blowers and hiding crucial data – with horrifying consequences for the rest of humanity.
One analysis by British academics claimed China could have cut cases by 95 per cent if action to contain the virus had been taken three weeks earlier. Other studies suggested pandemics permit only a narrow window for ‘pre-emptive intervention’.
Yet Chinese scientists had sequenced the genome of the virus even before Taiwanese health authorities alerted the globe – and then their officials lied about knowledge of human transmission at this critical early juncture.
This deliberate suppression of the truth puts all the tomfoolery and tussles in Downing Street into perspective, even if it does not excuse our dismal response.
Yet dismissal of the lab leak theory seemed strange given the likelihood of human error when at least 300 lab-acquired infections and 16 pathogen escapes have occurred in the first 21 years of this century.
It was inherently suspicious how a lethal new virus appeared suddenly in Wuhan – hundreds of miles from the nearest colonies of wild bats with similar coronaviruses.
And it happened in the city containing the maximum biosecurity lab that was Asia’s biggest repository of bat coronaviruses, had known safety concerns, removed its database of samples just before the disease emerged and was doing risky research to boost infectivity of mutant bat viruses in mice.
Michael Gove, who was at the heart of the Government’s response to the crisis, publicly reasserted that the view of ‘most intelligence agencies’ was that the virus had leaked after being super-charged by Chinese scientists to become ultra-infectious
Early studies found the virus ‘uniquely adapted to infect humans’ – and days after we disclosed them, China confirmed that a Wuhan wet market was a spreader (but not the source) of Sars-CoV-2, the strain of coronavirus causing Covid-19. Suspicions of open-minded scientists were raised by its ‘furin cleavage site’, which makes it ultra-infectious to humans but is not found on scores of similar coronaviruses. Some instantly saw this as a ‘smoking gun,’ pointing to engineering.
Then came a stunning discovery that scientists in Wuhan and their key Western collaborators had sought additional funding from Washington to insert this defining feature into Sars-like viruses just a year before the disease exploded.
One US expert told me a document submitted as part of the funding request looked like the ‘blueprint for creating the virus that causes Covid-19’.
The request was rejected due to risk. But China’s top bat researcher – who sequenced thousands of Sars-like bat coronaviruses, according to a US collaborator – refused to reply when asked if they pushed ahead with experiments anyway in Wuhan.
Now we know leading figures in both China and the West suspected lab origin from the start of the pandemic. Some knew ‘gain of function’ research was being conducted under ‘Wild West’ biosecurity conditions, in the memorable phrase of a key player.
Yet despite privately-held concerns and discussions, some of the most influential scientists in the US and Britain used their prominence to push statements into compliant media outlets and journals to dismiss ‘conspiracy theories’ about a lab leak in order to protect their own backs.
Here was the real conspiracy – underpinned by collusion between China and its cabal of useful idiots in the West. Slowly but surely, the truth gets glimpsed through clouds of official obfuscation. Yet despite all the deaths, misery and suffering over these past six years, there seem to be deep fears over pointing the finger of blame at the biggest villains of this grisly saga.
This is a betrayal of democracy, freedom and science – and of all the British families bereaved by the pandemic, since all signs suggest Covid was made in China just as surely as all the cheap toys, computer parts and electric cars that it exports around the globe.
