Covid ‘may have leaked out of Wuhan lab’, top Government adviser Sir John Bell claims
Covid ‘may have leaked out of Wuhan lab’, top Government adviser Sir John Bell claims… but he warns we’ll NEVER know for sure
Covid could well have leaked out of a Chinese laboratory, one of the Government’s most trusted pandemic experts sensationally claimed today.
Sir John Bell, who served as Boris Johnson‘s testing tsar, was grilled by MPs about his thoughts on the origins of the pandemic.
He admitted it was ‘quite possible’ that the virus leaked out of the infamous site in Wuhan, the city where Covid first emerged three years ago.
But Sir John, who was also an early member of the vaccines taskforce, said it’s unlikely that scientists will ever know the truth.
Sir John Bell (left), who served as Boris Johnson’s testing tsar, was grilled by MPs about his thoughts on the origins of the pandemic. He admitted it was ‘quite possible’ that the virus leaked out of the infamous site in Wuhan, the city where Covid first emerged three years ago. Steve Brine, MP for Winchester and a member of the health committee, said the ‘international community’, backed up by the World Health Organization, was ‘very, very quick’ to dismiss the lab leak theory. He said it may have impacted the global response because ‘we weren’t aware as quickly as we might have been’ about the Covid outbreak
Some say it’s possible the coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where researchers were conducting controversial research on the world’s most dangerous pathogens
The question of whether the global outbreak began with a spillover from wildlife sold at the market or leaked out of the Wuhan lab just eight miles across the Yangtze River has given rise to fierce debate about how to prevent the next pandemic. Studies point to a natural spillover at the Huanan wildlife market. Positive swab samples of floors, cages and counters also track the virus back to stalls in the southwestern corner of the market (bottom left), where animals with the potential to harbour Covid were sold for meat or fur at the time (bottom right)
Since China originally alerted the world to a mysterious virus circulating in Wuhan in December 2019, debate has been raging over its true source.
China has repeatedly insisted the virus spilled naturally into humans from bats, with most scientists agreeing Covid most likely had natural origins.
But some say it’s possible the coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), where researchers were conducting controversial research on the world’s most dangerous pathogens.
China insisted early and often that the virus did not leak from the lab, claiming that crossover to humans must have occurred at a ‘wet market’ in Wuhan that sold live animals.
Perhaps driven by animosity for then-US President Donald Trump, who embraced the lab leak theory early on, mainstream media and academics in the West heaped scorn on the possibility, calling it an unhinged conspiracy theory.
Sir John was asked about the debate in the debate as part of the Government inquiry into lessons learnt from the Covid pandemic, hosted by the Science and Technology Committee and Health and Social Care Committee.
Steve Brine, MP for Winchester and a member of the health committee, asked: ‘The origins of this virus are still unclear.
‘Do you have a view, with a little bit of benefit of reflection, as to how quickly the scientific community across the world dismissed the lab leak theory and whether that had an impact on our ability to respond to this?’
Sir John said: ‘I think this debate about where the virus actually came from is going to go on and on and I doubt that we’ll ever have a definitive answer.
‘I think it is quite possible that there was an accidental leak out of the lab in Wuhan.
‘And to be honest, handling highly pathogenic viruses, in any controlled circumstances, has got a lot of risks associated with it.’
He pointed to an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in Surrey in 2007, which spread to two farms and saw 600 cattle slaughtered. It was caused by a leak from The Pirbright Institute.
And smallpox leaked from a laboratory at the University of Birmingham Medical School in 1978, leading to the death of medical photographer Janet Parker, whose office was in the same building.
Sir John said: ‘These things, they do happen.
‘But I don’t think where this [Covid] came from is going to make any difference, would have made any difference, to how we managed the pandemic.
‘I think it was what it was and I’m not sure we should spend a whole lot of time going back worrying about it.
He added: ‘There are lots of sources of very serious pathogens, which only, I suspect, need a few mutations before they can migrate into a naive human population.
While China has insisted the virus originated elsewhere, academics, politicians and the media have contemplated the possibility it leaked from a high-level biochemical lab in Wuhan – raising suspicions that Chinese officials simply hid evidence of the early spread
‘And the avian flus are the obvious ones — that’s what I thought this pandemic was likely to be, was avian flu. They carry mortality of 20, 30, 40 per cent.
‘So what we’ve been through with a case-fatality rate of above 0.8 per cent is pretty small compared to what you’d get if you got a really pathogenic virus that caused a lot more trouble.’
But Mr Brine said the ‘international community’, backed up by the World Health Organization, was ‘very, very quick’ to dismiss the lab leak theory.
He said it may have impacted the global response because ‘we weren’t aware as quickly as we might have been’.
‘You may be right that China will never fess up to that, but surely as a world community should we not have higher standards than a conspiracy of silence around something that has killed hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens?’ Mr Brine said.
Sir John said: ‘Whether this came out of the Wuhan lab or not, we’ve got to have the highest possible standards when we’re holding pathogens in containment sites around the world.
‘That’s an obvious place where they’re going to leak from.
‘But I also on that basis don’t think we should dismiss the idea that there can be animal to human spread of pathogens that could also cause quite serious problems.
‘And, of course, the avian flus are an example where there is animal to human spread, there just isn’t a chain of human to human spread following that.
‘But that only requires a few mutations to happen. So I think we need to be conscious of both sources of transmission across the animal barrier, either via labs or directly and that should be way we approach it.’