The Wellcome Trust director and Sage member on what politicians and scientists got right and wrong on Covid and why we need an immediate public inquiry
Jeremy Farrar is the director of the Wellcome Trust, a former professor of tropical medicine at the University of Oxford and a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage). He has just published his account of the Covid crisis – Spike: The Virus v the People – in which he attacks the government for delaying a lockdown last autumn and describes the scientific and medical efforts that went into combating the pandemic.
At the beginning of the book, you say you initially believed that the virus might have leaked from a Chinese lab. Do you now reject that theory? And is there anything China could do to end that line of speculation?
You cannot absolutely, categorically, determine where the virus came from. But I do think that the balance of scientific evidence points strongly in favour of a natural origin, though you cannot totally rule out laboratory accidents. In order to do that, you’d have to find the intermediate animal host. And that could be one of thousands of different species of animals. It’s a needle in the haystack. What could China do? If it were to totally open up its laboratories, laboratory books and all its data… but I’m not even sure that would convince the doubters. But it would be great to have more transparency on all sides.
