If any evidence exists that the Covid-19 pandemic was caused by a lab leak in Wuhan it would likely have been destroyed by China, the former head of MI6 has said. Sir Richard Dearlove has said proving the theory that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was working on 'gain of function' experiments to create a natural coronavirus that would be more deadly to humans will be very difficult.
He also said he thought Western countries had been naive in their trust of China, which he says has infiltrated scientific institutions and journals in Britain and abroad. Speaking to The Daily Telegraph's 'Planet Normal' podcast, Dearlove - who lead the British secret intelligence service from 1999 to 2004 - also said it was possible that scientists who wanted to speak about the experiments had been 'silenced'.
'The People's Republic of China is a pretty terrifying regime and does some things we consider unacceptable and extreme in silencing opposition to the official line of the government,' he said.
'We don't know that's what's happened, but a lot of data have probably been destroyed or made to disappear so it's going to be difficult to prove definitely the case for a "gain of function chimera" being the cause of the pandemic.' For this reason, Sir Richard said, scientific research is now more important to determine whether the virus was created in a man-made lab experiment. Sir Richard's comments come after US President Joe Biden last week told intelligence agencies to look into the lab leak theory, along with other possible origins for the coronavirus, and deliver a report to him within 90 days.
British intelligence is working alongside their US counterparts, and have said that the theory that coronavirus leaked from a lab is 'feasible', while a number of respected scientists have called for a major inquiry into its origins.
Dearlove has long questioned the origins of the coronavirus and spoke of how he received 'a lot of stick' for sharing his beliefs in the past. British intelligence operatives now believe the theory, once discarded as a conspiracy theory, is 'feasible'.
They are now investigating the possibility that a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese research facility, sparked the global crisis which has sparked more than 3.5 million deaths.
Western intelligence agencies had seemingly written off the 'remote' chance that the laboratory - where research into bat-derived coronaviruses is conducted - had played a role, but a recent reassessment has meant the leak theory is considered 'feasible', sources say.
The development, which Beijing has angrily denied, has prompted US diplomatic sources to share their concerns 'we are one wet market or bio lab away from the next spillover', The Sunday Times reports.
Chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, Tom Tugendhat, said: 'The silence coming from Wuhan is troubling. We need to open the crypt and see what happened to be able to protect ourselves in the future. That means starting an investigation, along with partners around the world and in the WHO.'
Last week US President Joe Biden told intelligence agencies to look into the lab leak theory, along with other possible origins for the coronavirus, and deliver a report to him within 90 days.
British intelligence is working alongside their US counterparts.
A western intelligence source familiar with British involvement said: 'There might be pockets of evidence that take us one way, and evidence that takes us another way.
'The Chinese will lie either way. I don't think we will ever know.'
Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said a World Health Organisation investigation must be able to fully investigate the origins of the pandemic.
He told Sky News this week: 'I think it's really important that the WHO is allowed to conduct its investigation unencumbered into the origins of this pandemic and that we should leave no stone unturned to understand why - not only because of the current pandemic that has swept the world but also for future-proofing the world's capability to deal with pandemics.'
Scientists who had called for an inquiry into the lab leak theory say they have been silenced by colleagues and journals over the past year.
Jamie Metzl, human genome editing advisor to the WHO, said: 'Since the earliest days of the pandemic there were a small number of leading scientists who took it upon themselves to enforce this kind of orthodoxy.
'We were ostracised and called conspiracy theorists.'
The origins of the virus are under fresh scrutiny with the collapse of the scientific consensus that it emerged from human contact with an infected animal, with some experts now arguing that the virus was man-made.
David Asher, who led a task force investigating the origins of Covid, said evidence pointed to a leak from a biological weapons program at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which the Chinese government has repeatedly denied.
President Biden ordered the intelligence community to re-examine how the virus originated, including the lab accident theory. He ordered a 90-day intelligence push to get to the bottom of the question.
His announcement followed the revelation that a previously undisclosed intelligence report had been made to the White House, claiming that several researchers at the Wuhan institute were hospitalized with illness in November 2019. The document was uncovered this week by the Wall Street Journal.
Both the US and Britain are stepping up demands for the World Health Organisation to take a closer look into the origins of the virus, including a new visit to China where the first human infections were detected.
US health officials have also come under fire for allegedly funding researchers' controversial and risky experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
US House Republican Whip Steve Scalise and more than 200 of his GOP colleagues have also called for Nancy Pelosi to direct her Democrat-led committees to investigate China's complicity in causing the Covid pandemic.
In a letter to the Democratic House Speaker, the Republicans said there is 'mounting evidence the pandemic started in a Chinese lab' and the Chinese Communist Party 'covered it up'.
'If that is the case, the CCP is responsible for the deaths of almost 600,000 Americans and millions more worldwide. These questions about the CCP's liability are not a diversion, as you falsely claimed,' the letter reads.
Meanwhile, an explosive new study claims Chinese scientists created Covid in a Wuhan lab, then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.
The paper's authors, British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen, wrote that they have had 'prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China' for a year - but were ignored by academics and major journals.
Dalgleish is a professor of oncology at St George's University, London, and is best known for his breakthrough creating the first working 'HIV vaccine', to treat diagnosed patients and allow them to go off medication for months.
Sørensen, a virologist, is chair of pharmaceutical company, Immunor, which developed a coronavirus vaccine candidate called Biovacc-19. Dalgleish also has share options in the firm.
The shocking allegations in the study include accusations of 'deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data' at Chinese labs, and it notes the silencing and disappearance of scientists in the communist country who spoke out.
The journal article, obtained by DailyMail.com, is set to make waves among the scientific community, as the majority of experts have until recently staunchly denied the origins of COVID-19 were anything other than a natural infection leaping from animals to humans.
While analyzing COVID-19 samples last year in an attempt to create a vaccine, Dalgleish and Sørensen discovered 'unique fingerprints' in the virus that they say could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory.
They said they tried to publish their findings but were rejected by major scientific journals which were at the time resolute that the virus jumped naturally from bats or other animals to humans.
Even when former MI6 chief Sir Richard spoke out publicly saying the scientists' theory should be investigated, the idea was dismissed as 'fake news'.
Over a year later, leading academics, politicians and the media finally flipped, and have begun to contemplate the possibility that COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China - a lab where experiments included manipulating viruses to increase their infectiousness in order to study their potential effects on humans.
Dalgleish and Sørensen have authored a new study, which concludes that 'SARS-Coronavirus-2 has no credible natural ancestor' and that it is 'beyond reasonable doubt' that the virus was created through 'laboratory manipulation'.
In the 22-page paper which is set to be published in the scientific journal Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, the scientists describe their months-long 'forensic analysis', looking back at experiments done at the Wuhan lab between 2002 and 2019.
