Chinese lab leak theory gains momentum as US officials exposed

Senior officials in the US government – under the Trump and Biden administrations – tried to throttle investigations into the theory, until recently dismissed as a conspiracy.

Head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious ­Diseases, Anthony Fauci. Picture: AFP

Senior officials in the US government – under the Trump and Biden administrations – tried to throttle investigations into the theory, until recently dismissed as a conspiracy, that Covid-19 may have accidentally leaked from a Chinese laboratory.

Senior State Department officials were mired in conflicts of interest because of their previous support for controversial virology research and one group set up to prove the lab leak scenario was “repeatedly advised not to open a Pandora’s box”, according to four former departmental staffers.

In an investigation published on Friday, US magazine Vanity Fair reported Christopher Park, a senior State Department figure, advised other officials “not to say anything that would point to the U.S. government’s own role in gain-of-function research”.

The investigation – which comes days after release of a series of emails that suggested Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious ­Diseases, entertained the idea last year that Sars-Cov-2 was “engineered” – will put pressure on the US government’s new investigation into the origin of the disease called by Joe Biden last month.

One group of 40 scientists – known as the Decentralised ­Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating Covid-19, or DRASTIC – told The Weekend Australian it was concerned Dr Fauci was not “forthcoming with information that should have been made public”.

“I think he’s a very clever man, but he’s been sailing a bit close to the wind,” one of the group’s members, Gilles Demaneuf, said.

Most of DRASTIC believe the virus leaked – “my own view is at max 70 per cent until I get more data” – according to Mr Demaneuf, who said the virus was almost certainly “rampant” in China in November 2019, much earlier than December, Beijing’s publicly stated position.

“What is very clear is that there was a Chinese cover up – but we don’t know why. When you look at the obfuscation (by China) it is sometimes difficult to tell whether it’s because of the origins or because they absolutely don’t want to recognise that there were many cases in November,” Mr Demaneuf, a data scientist at the Bank of New Zealand, said.

Robert Redfield, the former director of the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, told Vanity Fair he was “threatened and ostracised because I proposed another hypothesis (that the virus escaped the Wuhan Lab)”, and had received death threats for airing the idea publicly on CNN.

The Weekend Australian has previously revealed Dr Fauci had argued that the benefits of experimenting on contagious viruses was worth the risk of a laboratory incident sparking a pandemic.

Dr Fauci on May 11 reversed his position on whether Covid-19 had leaked from a Wuhan lab, and said he was now “not convinced” the virus had developed naturally and authorities needed to find out “exactly what happened”.