Have researchers close to Beijing been compromised?
Ian Birrell is an award-winning foreign reporter and columnist. He is also the founder, with Damon Albarn, of Africa Express. August 13, 2021 Nine months ago, the scientific establishment’s determined efforts to stifle debate on the origins of the pandemic began to crumble with the revelation that Peter Daszak, a British scientist with long-standing links to Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), had secretly orchestrated a landmark statement in The Lancet. Published last February, this influential missive, signed by 27 leading public health experts, infamously attacked “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”, saying they only spread “fear, rumours, and prejudice.” Incredibly, it also praised Beijing’s “rapid, open and transparent” sharing of data. The clandestine involvement of Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance charity, was exposed in a batch of emails obtained by US Right To Know. This tenacious body has played an important role in opening up global debate on the pandemic’s origins, chipping away with freedom of information requests to draw out crumbs of evidence exposing attempts by leading scientific figures to shut down talk of any lab-related incident. And the more we discover from such efforts, the murkier the events early last year seem to appear. The investigative body’s most recent cache of documents — published this week — involve emails obtained from Ohio State University virologist Shan-Lu Liu. They reveal a senior Chinese researcher was infected with Covid-19 in a leading Beijing virology laboratory soon after the Wuhan outbreak, highlighting the risks of inadvertent laboratory transmission. They also suggest that, according to Prof Liu, WIV “has many bat samples not yet worked out or results published”. Yet perhaps most significantly, the emails from early last year expose yet again how key science journals, supposed to promote unfettered debate among experts, instead pushed the idea that anyone questioning the notion of natural transmission from animals was a wild-eyed conspiracy nut. There has been alarm over The Lancet, along with the likes of Nature and Scientific American, for their roles in inflaming such myopic viewpoints, sparking concern over the Chinese ties of their corporate owners. Such fears are heightened when even Peter Ben Embarek, head of the World Health Organisation’s patsy study into the origins, suddenly turns round — as he did yesterday — and says Patient Zero in the pandemic may be a worker at a Wuhan laboratory after all. By Ian Birrell But these latest emails provoke serious questions over another influential journal, Emerging Microbes & Infections, which is printed by Taylor & Francis, the blue-chip British publisher with roots stretching back to the eighteenth century. Last February, this journal published a widely-cited commentary by four US-based scientists under the title: “No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of Sars-CoV-2.” The newly obtained emails show the article was “invited” by Shan Lu, a professor in Massachusetts who co-edits the journal. Later, Prof Liu mentions comments and changes suggested by Shi Zhengli, the WIV virologist nicknamed “Batwoman” whose research was backed by Daszak. The pair found scores of Sars-like viruses in the bat caves of southern China, hundreds of miles from Wuhan.
