Opinion on Sunday: We shouldn’t rely solely on the Mail on Sunday to uncover the facts about Covid.

Five years have passed since The Mail on Sunday was one of the first to express concerns about the possibility of the Covid virus originating from a lab leak in Wuhan, China.

If this is so, then the world’s reaction to this frightening outbreak needs to be re-examined from top to bottom.

The implications of such a development – not least the rules and laws that govern this sort of experimentation – are huge. 

Establishing the truth is crucial, but it can only be accomplished by listening to whistleblowers and having major governments and the scientific community work together to uncover the facts.

It was anticipated to be challenging from the start, given that China is known for its secrecy, controlled media, and officials unaccustomed to the level of transparency common in Western democracies.

Media and politicians in the free world will have to do most of the heavy work. That would be pressing enough in itself.

But as The Mail on Sunday found when we first raised this appalling possibility, the response in the democratic nations was not much better than in the Chinese People’s Republic, where the response was blank denial. 

Officialdom scoffed and promoted alternative explanations that have turned out to be increasingly implausible.

Take Anthony Fauci, one of the US’s most influential doctors. He became a Presidential adviser, and the trusted face of medical authority in America during the Covid crisis. 

But he promoted a theory that has now been widely dismissed, that the virus was transmitted naturally to humans through animals on sale in ‘wet markets’ in Wuhan. 

Dr Fauci kept his options very much open on the possibility of it being a laboratory leak. He has stated that ‘I’ve always been very, very clear, and said multiple times, that I don’t think the concept of there being a lab [leak] is inherently a conspiracy theory’.

Now an expert of equal stature, the virologist Robert Redfield, has weighed in, very much in favour of the laboratory leak theory. Dr Redfield was Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2018 to 2021. 

He told this newspaper he is now convinced that Covid-19 resulted from scientists becoming infected while carrying out dangerous experiments in which they were trying to boost the infectivity of bat viruses. 

He believes this happened partly thanks to poor biosecurity in Chinese laboratories. 

He told our reporter Ian Birrell, who has been pursuing the story for many years, that the facts have been concealed because those involved did not want it to get out that they were backing highly controversial ‘gain-of-function’ research. 

This sort of research was banned in the US itself between 2014 and 2017.

As so often when there is a strong official line in support of a policy, dissenting scientists were unfairly labelled as ‘conspiracy theorists’, an effective dismissal, all too often used against reasonable doubts.

Dr Redfield also fears that security services pulled strings to protect those involved. He believes the lab leak occurred between mid-August and September 2019, when scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology became infected, but Chinese leaders covered up the outbreak. 

And he reveals he received atrocious threats for warning of the danger. Such treatment of honest, informed questioning is disgraceful.

This is a matter of pressing, vital importance. It deserves the most serious consideration at the highest possible level.