Behind the scenes whilst the "Condemning lab leak conspiracy theories" letter was being written for the Lancet

Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust reveals all

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On 19 February 2020 a statement was published in the Lancet in which the authors said:

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

One of the authors was Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust and, at the time, was part of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) in the UK.

I’m currently reading the book he published last year - Spike, the Virus vs the People, The Inside Story - in which he “reveals all” as to what went on, including before this letter was published. It seems that he and probably other authors of the letter, had similar conspiratorial theories along the lines of the ones that they were strongly condemning.

Jeremy is in an extremely senior position and seems to have co-ordinated the West’s response to Covid. Freedom of Information emails have revealed that he was organising meetings with Anthony Fauci (US) and Patrick Vallance (UK), as well as others, to investigate and respond to the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

Despite his seniority, in January 2020, he was so concerned over a lab leak that he did things he’d never done before.

he would “acquire a burner phone, hold clandestine meetings, keep difficult secrets…I phoned my brother and best friend…I sketched out the possibility of a looming global health crisis that had the potential to be read as bioterrorism…'If anything happens to me in the next few weeks,’ I told them nervously, ‘this is what you need to know.’”

On 5 January 2020, Jeremy thought that “testing only those people with a link to the [Wuhan] market created the illusion that the market was the source of the disease, because everyone testing positive had been there”.

Towards the end of January an “even bigger crisis was brewing”.

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“After the genetic sequence of the virus was published, people began noticing something peculiar about its molecular structure. In the last week of January 2020, I saw email chatter from scientists in the US suggesting the virus looked almost engineered to infect human cells. These were credible scientists proposing an incredible, and terrifying, possibility of either an accidental leak from a laboratory or a deliberate release.

…This was a brand-new virus that seemingly sprang from nowhere. Except that this pathogen had surface in Wuhan, a city with a BSL-4 virology lab which is home to an almost unrivalled collection of bat viruses.

..It seemed a huge coincidence for a coronavirus to crop up in Wuhan, a city with a superlab. Could the novel coronavirus be anything to do with ‘gain of function’ (GOF) studies?

Jeremy then goes on to describe what GOF is and how it works before discussing the pros and cons, concluding that “GOF research can furnish scientific findings that are ultimately useful [and] bans are often unworkable in practice.”

He then questions whether it was even novel at all. “It might have been engineered years ago, put in a freezer, and then taken out more recently by someone who decided to work on it again. And then, maybe, there was…an accident?”

“It sounded crazy but once you get into a mindset it becomes easy to connect things that are unrelated. You begin to see a pattern that is only there because of your own starting bias. And my starting bias was that it was odd for a spillover event, from animals to humans, to take off in people so immediately and spectacularly - in a city with a biolab. One standout molecular feature of the virus was a region in the genome sequence called a furin cleavage site, which enhances infectivity. This novel virus, spreading like wildfire, seemed almost designed to infect human cells.”

Due to his concerns over a lab leak, he told his colleague at Wellcome, Eliza Manningham-Buller. Eliza was the former director general of the UK intelligence agency MI5. She advised that everyone raise their guard, security wise. “We should use different phones; avoid putting things in emails; and ditch our normal email addresses and phone contacts”.

This begs the questions, when we read released emails between Farrar and Fauci, are these the only emails? What emails was he sending on his new email address?

The burner phone, mentioned above, started to be used. He rang his brother who “could hear the fear in my voice”.

Towards the end of January 2020, Jeremy reports on a call between Kristian Andersen from the Scripps Research Institute in California and Eddie Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney.

“During the call, Kristian confessed to Eddie that three things bothered him about the new virus. The first was the receptor binding domain, the bit of the spike protein in the virus that attaches to the host cell to infect it, looked too good to be true - like a perfect ‘key’ for entering human cells.

The second klaxon was that this ‘key’ was accompanied by a short genome sequence known as a furin cleavage site, seen in highly contagious flu viruses….we had never seen it before in these coronaviruses. If someone had set out to adapt an animal coronavirus to humans by taking a specific bit of genetic material from somewhere else and inserting it, this was what it might end up looking like.

And then Kristian delivered his denouement: he’d found a scientific paper where exactly this technique had been used to modify the spike protein of the original SARS-CoV-1 virus….At first glace, the paper Kristian had unearthed looked like a how-to manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory. The pair knew of a laboratory where researchers had been experimenting on coronaviruses for years: the Wuhan Institute of Virology. ‘Fuck, this is bad’ was Eddie’s first reaction.”

Kristian also asked his colleague, Michael Farzan, for an opinion. Michael had made discoveries on how SARS-CoV-1 binds to human cells. “Michael confessed he was struggling to figure out how the new coronavirus could have acquired its features in a natural way”.

Bob Garry from Tulane University had also independently “clocked what looked like peculiarities in the virus”.

Jeremy convened a dream panel to challenge each other over the origins of Covid. The main reasons given for the virus not being from a lab was that “if someone was engineering a coronavirus, they wouldn’t use some random bat virus in their own lab. They’d use a familiar strain that they knew could infect cells….There was just no close genetic backbone in the literature, despite there being hundreds and hundreds of genomes of SARS-like viruses in the databases. If you are going to make something, why wouldn’t you use one of those to play with?”

What about the furin cleavage site? This had been played with before. According to Marion Koopmans from Erasmus University in the Netherlands, “you get insertions like that in nature all the time”. However, Kristian cautioned “just because it happens in nature did not rule out unnatural origins, especially as closely related coronaviruses lacked some of the same structural features.”

These conversations were taking place at the end of January. At this point, Eddie was “80 per cent sure this thing had come out of a lab. Kristian was about 60 to 70 per cent convinced in the same direction.” Others were not far behind and Jeremy was going to need persuading that things weren’t as sinister as they seemed. Intelligence agencies across the world were informed.

On 1 February 2020 a conference call was organised with Tony Fauci, Francis Collins, Bob Garry, Ron Fouchier and Patrick Vallance, as well as others. The next day Jeremy emailed Tony and Francis

“On a spectrum if 0 is nature and 100 is release - I am honestly at 50! My guess is that this will remain grey, unless there is access to the Wuhan lab - and I suspect that is unlikely.”

So at this point the lab leak hypothesis was the most likely to a lot of prestigious scientists. Jeremy himself was 50/50. However, two weeks later the Lancet statement was issued deeming any talk of a lab leak as conspiracy theory. What changed in that time?

The book doesn’t tell us, it suddenly fast forwards to March after “the addition of important new information, endless analyses, intense discussions and many sleepless nights”.

On 17 March 2020, a new paper was published in Nature Medicine, which stated “our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”

What new information had caused this turnaround? The authors explained

“the new coronavirus attached itself to cells quite differently from SARS-CoV-1 - and was also unlike any of the know viruses used in gain of function research in labs. That rendered deliberate manipulation an implausible scenario. Why? A malevolent scientist is still a scientist - and the most methodical way of conjuring up a nightmare virus would be to take a virus that is already a know quantity, such as SARS-CoV-1, and crank up its infectivity using know methods.

Or, as Kristian puts it, Scientist are lazy. If we want to make viruses in the lab, we follow recipes we’ve used for decades because we know they work. This virus bore no lab signature whatsoever”

This directly contradicted what was said earlier when they had discovered a sort of blueprint for creating SARS-CoV-2 in old scientific papers. Furthermore, Ralph Baric from the University of North Carolina, an expert in these GOF techniques is on record saying that it is easy to create a new virus without a lab signature.

However, this is beside the point, all this information is from the middle of March, almost a month after the statement was made in the Lancet. The book continues with other reasons why, in March, they didn’t think the virus came from a lab. But, in February, as we have seen above, many experts were firmly of the view that it had come from a lab.

There is no information to indicate why their views suddenly changed in the space of a few weeks.

Why then, was such a strongly worded statement issued in the Lancet, when many scientists were still so unsure? I understand the need for diplomacy and not wanting to panic the world but in supressing information how many lives were lost? If the true origins of the virus could have been investigated without worry of being called a conspiracy theorist then perhaps early treatments would have been more forthcoming.

Whatever the motivations, supressing information is not the way. It restricts investigations, hypotheses, discussions and debates. Ultimately, this costs lives. Furthermore, it creates an atmosphere of distrust and is probably why most of us are on Substack discussing this stuff.