The origins of Covid may never be known, Britain’s top scientist has warned.
Dame Angela McLean, the government’s chief scientific adviser, claimed we will probably never know whether the virus emerged naturally or escaped from a laboratory.
It has been suggested that Covid was bioengineered at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in central China, which specialized in studying coronaviruses.
Professor McLean, who took over from Sir Patrick Vallance, told Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘I am convinced that it is very unlikely that we will ever know whether this was a virus that came out of a laboratory, or a natural virus that has entered humans. via completely natural routes.
‘We cannot see that from the biology of the virus.’
Professor Dame Angela McLean (pictured), the government’s chief scientific adviser, told Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘I am convinced that it is very unlikely that we will ever know whether this was a virus that came from a laboratory, or a natural virus that entered humans via completely natural routes’
It has been suggested that Covid was bioengineered at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (pictured) in central China, which specializes in studying coronaviruses
Other theories about the origins of Covid point to the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan as the epicenter of the outbreak. Many of the first cases in December 2019 and January 2020 had visited the location where live animals were sold
Asked whether the Chinese should be honest about what happened in the lead-up to the pandemic, she said: “I think if I were a Chinese scientist I wouldn’t go that way because I think this would cause a lot of problems could cause. for me.’
Last week, Professor McLean launched a new US-British partnership to protect us from future biological threats.
The Chinese government has rejected suggestions that Covid came from the laboratory in Wuhan.
But last year, the head of China’s Center for Disease Control (CDC), Professor George Gao, said the possibility should not be “ruled out.”
Declassified US intelligence reports stated that the laboratory leak theory was ‘plausible’.
FBI Director Christopher Wray believes Covid most likely originated in the laboratory, saying last year: “The FBI has long determined that the origin of the pandemic is most likely a potential laboratory incident.”
He accused China of “doing its best to try to thwart and obscure efforts to identify the source of the global pandemic, which is estimated to have cost Britain £410 billion.”
While China insists the virus originated elsewhere, academics, politicians and the media have considered the possibility that it may have leaked from a high-level biochemical laboratory in Wuhan, raising suspicions that Chinese officials were simply hiding evidence of its early spread .
The WHO’s initial investigation in January 2021, in which a group of scientists traveled to Wuhan, concluded that “all hypotheses remain on the table.” In its March 2021 report, it ranked the likelihood of four theories, with the natural origins theory considered the most likely. But it put the lab leak an “extremely unlikely path” behind the frozen food origin story
An unnamed US official told the Sunday Times that scientists from the Wuhan laboratory worked with the Chinese military to combine the world’s most deadly coronaviruses to create a new mutated virus.
A 2021 joint study by China and the World Health Organization (WHO) called the lab leak theory “extremely unlikely.”
However, the study was widely criticized for being based on weak evidence and the WHO failing to pressure China to provide reliable data.
The WHO director-general has since called for a new investigation, saying: ‘All hypotheses remain open and require further investigation.’
Many scientists point out that there is no evidence that Covid leaked from a laboratory, saying it most likely jumped from animals to humans via a wet market in Wuhan.