Wuhan podcast: Ex-spy chief exposes China complicity

UK is probing the extent to which the scientific community has been compromised by a ‘malign Chinese communist influence’.

Sir Richard Dearlove. Picture: Getty Images

The British government is examining the extent to which the scientific community has been compromised by a “malign Chinese communist influence”, ­according to a former head of the British Secret Intelligence Service.

Former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove said prompting the ­review was the cover-up of the ­origins of Covid-19, where scientific journals and academic institutions perpetuated the Chinese narrative that the virus had a natural origin and refused to consider the possibility of a lab­oratory leak.

In an extended interview featured in The Australian’s podcast What Really Happened in Wuhan, Sir Richard said the British scientific community over the past two decades had developed a very close relationship with the Chinese scientific community.

He said this had both positive and negative ramifications. “What I believe has happened is that many of our academic institutions and many academic journals have become partially or totally dependent on Chinese funding,” he said. “Here in the UK now, as a ­result of this whole business, there is a move centrally in government to look closely at the extent to which the scientific community has been subject to a malign Chinese communist ­influence.”

Apart from Western universities’ failure to properly examine the origins of the pandemic, they had also been grappling with the significant issue of intellectual property theft from Chinese ­research institutions, Sir Richard said. “In the future, we will have to take very careful steps to control this in terms of registering where Chinese research students go and what their interests are, and take greater steps to protect intellectual property in our universities, particularly in areas of sensitive research.”

After the coronavirus outbreak emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, Sir Richard suspects China’s Ministry of State Security developed an information – or disinformation – campaign around the origins of the virus.

It was so successful that any suggestion of a laboratory leak from the Wuhan Institute of ­Virology, which houses the world’s largest collection of coronaviruses, was dismissed as a conspiracy throughout 2020.

It wasn’t until incoming Democratic President Joe Biden ordered a 90-day probe by the ­intelligence community in May 2021 that the possibility the pandemic started from an inadvertent leak was taken seriously by parts of the media and scientific establishment.

“I’m pretty sure that the Chinese after the outbreak in Wuhan, and they’re very good at doing this, sat down and developed their own information campaign and this was almost certainly driven by the Ministry of State Security and run out of the PRC leadership to make sure that there was ­suppression of any suggestion that their narrative was not the correct one,” Sir Richard said in the podcast.

“What concerns me and what worries me is the extent to which the West went along with this.”

Sir Richard was a Cold War spy who worked behind the Iron Curtain and rose through the ranks of MI6 where he served as director from 1999 until 2004.

He participated in interviews for both the What Really Happened in Wuhan book and a Sky News documentary, which form the basis of The Australian’s new podcast.

In her new podcast, Sharri Markson goes deep into the secret history of Covid-19. In a series of exclusive interviews – from Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo to intelligence chiefs and Chinese dissidents – Markson takes us inside the investigation behind her bestselling book and documentary to explore What Really Happened in Wuhan and beyond