Listening to Sir Patrick Vallance's interview with BBC (bbc.co.uk/programmes/p09…). Asked why his emails discussing the pandemic origins were redacted when I sought them under FOI (dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…), he admits this is a problem for transparency and undermines public trust...
He says he would be happy for the emails to be released but claims he could not do so since they were not his emails and he was only attending a meeting organised by others. He insists the details are not exciting...
...but then adds, intriguingly, 'the output of that was a scientific paper published by that group'. Presumably this was 'The proximal origin of Sars-CoV-2″ published in Nature Medicine that concluded “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible”.
So Vallance discloses that this hugely-influential and unequivocal dismissal of any lab incident origins was effectively organised by Anthony Fauci, Francis Collins (who ran the US body funding Wuhan gain of function research) and Wellcome Trust director Jeremy Farrar.
No wonder there is such reluctance to release these emails in both the UK and the US - even as the likes of Farrar and Vallance pontificate about the importance of transparency and openness in science.
Vallance, the government's chief scientific adviser, also says emphatically his role is not to investigate the 'crucially important' possible lab origins of the pandemic - underlining the UK's myopic stance on this issue.
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