There was no such reticence to discuss lab leaks before the Covid pandemic. Back in 2006, the WHO was keen to stress the risk of lab leaks of the first SARS virus: ‘A new epidemic of SARS would most likely emerge from an animal reservoir or a laboratory doing research with live cultures of SARS-CoV or handling stored clinical specimens containing SARS-CoV. The risk of re-emergence from a laboratory source is thought to be potentially greater.’ In 2012, scientist Lyn Klotz said that ‘there is a substantial probability that a pandemic with over 100million fatalities could be seeded from an undetected lab-acquired infection, if a single infected lab worker spreads infection as he moves about in the community’. And in 2017, Peter Daszak, the $460,000-a-year head of the EcoHealth Alliance, was happy to talk about the world facing an increasing risk from the accidental release of ‘laboratory-enhanced variants’. In a slide shown as part of a pitch for funding, he said that ‘gain-of-function and “DIY” research is elevating the risk of the accidental and / or deliberate release of deadly novel biological agents’. (Although six months earlier he had written in an email stating ‘we are very happy to hear that our gain-of-function research funding pause has been lifted’.)

By Matt Ridley. Excerpts:

"a laboratory-derived virus, being already trained on human cells, is bound to spread faster than one that has just jumped from an animal. And SARS‑CoV‑2 was unusually infectious for a pathogen new to the human species."

"The evidence that this virus probably came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is now voluminous, detailed and strong. That an outbreak caused by a bat sarbecovirus should happen in the one city in the world that had been collecting hundreds of bat sarbecoviruses and experimenting on them is striking enough. That it happened one year after that lab proposed inserting the one feature that distinguishes SARS‑CoV‑2 from all other viruses of the same kind makes it a heck of a coincidence. That the virus was highly infectious from the start, highly attuned to human receptors and evolving comparatively slowly, implying it had been already trained on human cells, was a shock. That the lab in question refuses to this day to release the database of the viruses it had been working on is as insulting as it is suspicious."

"The leading laboratory for bat sarbecoviruses in the world is not in Baltimore, Birmingham or Bombay. It is in Wuhan. When foot and mouth disease broke out near Pirbright in the UK in 2007, where the world’s leading reference laboratory for the foot-and-mouth virus is situated, it wasn’t a coincidence. When anthrax broke out downwind of a Soviet bioweapons factory in Sverdlovsk in 1979, it wasn’t a coincidence. When brucellosis broke out in Lanzhou in 2019, right by a brucellosis vaccine factory, it wasn’t a coincidence. And when smallpox infected a medical photographer at a smallpox lab in Birmingham in 1978, it wasn’t a coincidence. Lab leaks happen all the time. SARS itself leaked from labs after the end of the SARS epidemic of 2003 at least six times – once in Singapore, once in Taiwan and four times in Beijing."

"two days after the call with Evergrande, Dr Fauci and his colleagues started shutting down speculation about a lab leak, even though they had open-mindedly discussed the possibility over the preceding weekend, with some scientists deeming it ‘friggin’ likely’."

"I tested the reluctance of the establishment to discuss the lab leak first hand. I asked the biological secretary of the UK’s Royal Society if she would organise a debate about the origin of the virus. No, she said, we only debate scientific matters. Eh? I asked the Academy of Medical Sciences, of which I am a fellow. Too controversial, they said. I asked a government minister. Better left to the World Health Organisation, he replied. I asked another government minister. Surely it’s time to move on, he said. I asked a very senior scientist. Better we never find out, he said, lest it annoy the Chinese. At least he was honest."

"There have been a handful of papers over the past few years claiming to show that a ‘natural’ zoonotic event in a market was a more likely cause. Sadly, these have generally proved to contain major errors. The one showing that cases were centred on the market missed out half the early cases. The one claiming to show that two separate animals infected people in the market miscalculated its probability statistics by two orders of magnitude. The one claiming an association of virus genetic material with raccoon-dog genetic material actually showed the opposite. The one claiming pangolins were involved is now accompanied by a long list of corrections. And so on. As George Gao, the former head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control, has said again and again: this virus did not start in the market and no infected animal apart from human beings was found in the early days."

"There was no such reticence to discuss lab leaks before the Covid pandemic. Back in 2006, the WHO was keen to stress the risk of lab leaks of the first SARS virus: ‘A new epidemic of SARS would most likely emerge from an animal reservoir or a laboratory doing research with live cultures of SARS-CoV or handling stored clinical specimens containing SARS-CoV. The risk of re-emergence from a laboratory source is thought to be potentially greater.’

In 2012, scientist Lyn Klotz said that ‘there is a substantial probability that a pandemic with over 100million fatalities could be seeded from an undetected lab-acquired infection, if a single infected lab worker spreads infection as he moves about in the community’.

And in 2017, Peter Daszak, the $460,000-a-year head of the EcoHealth Alliance, was happy to talk about the world facing an increasing risk from the accidental release of ‘laboratory-enhanced variants’. In a slide shown as part of a pitch for funding, he said that ‘gain-of-function and “DIY” research is elevating the risk of the accidental and / or deliberate release of deadly novel biological agents’. (Although six months earlier he had written in an email stating ‘we are very happy to hear that our gain-of-function research funding pause has been lifted’.)"