Thread by @sophie_e_hill

A group of hard-right Brexiteers, including a former head of MI6, secretly attacked a top science journal after their debunked paper on an "alternative" Covid vaccine was rejected.

From @ComputerWeekly & @BylineTimes, this is a MUST READ 👇

computerweekly.com/news/366553435…

This piece raises serious questions about the conduct of Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6 who is best known for his role in the intelligence failures surrounding the Iraq war.

In the early stages of the pandemic, Dearlove began collaborating with a group of scientists who claimed to have proof that the Covid pandemic was the result of a lab leak.

One of those scientists was Professor Gus Dalgleish - an oncologist who made pioneering contributions to HIV/AIDS research in the 1980s, and now spends his time as a UKIP candidate, GB News talking head, and contributor to sites like TCW (The Conservative Woman).

Gus Dalgleish had teamed up with a Norwegian virologist, Birger Sørensen, whose Oslo pharma company (Immunor AS) was purportedly going to manufacture BioVacc-19, the group's proposed "alternative" Covid vaccine.

Dearlove was so convinced by Dalgleish and Sørensen that he lent his name and credibility to a "secret" briefing to Prime Minister Boris Johnson in March 2020 promoting their claims.

In this briefing, Dearlove and his longtime collaborator, the retired historian Gwythian Prins, wrote "it is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in Wuhan Institute of Virology".

(Neither Dearlove nor Prins have any expertise in virology or epidemiology.)

The briefing also alleged that the scientific journal Nature had been "used to promulgate the PRC narrative" because it had published the much-cited letter by Andersen et al. that argued in favour of a natural origin.

In fact, Dearlove and Prins became so convinced of malign Chinese influence at Nature that they asked the government to put the journal under electronic surveillance (!!)

In one email, Prins describes asking then Cabinet Secretary Michael Gove for "the warrant and taps" against staff at Nature and Nature Medicine. He later wrote that Gove was taking this advice "very seriously".

Dearlove also emailed a senior ex-Foreign Office official asking the "powers that be" to have the group "on warrant". (There is no evidence that the official responded.)

Not content with lobbying their own government to spy on the journal, Dearlove and Prins also used their contacts in the intelligence world to share their attacks on Nature with Mossad, Japanese intelligence services, and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service.

Dearlove emailed Efraim Halevy, a former head of Mossad, with a briefing claiming that China was attempting to control the debate over the virus origins "with active help from non-Chinese agents of influence, notably at the scientific journal Nature".

Dearlove and his collaborators also turned to open source intelligence to find evidence of supposed Chinese infiltration of Nature... such as the fact that the journal had sent birthday greetings to the Chinese Academy of Sciences on its 70th anniversary.

While Dalgleish and Sørensen struggled to publish their scientific findings in an academic journal, Dearlove publicly promoted their claim about evidence of a lab leak in an interview on a Daily Telegraph podcast.

(Dalgleish and Sørensen did eventually get a version of their paper published in a different peer-reviewed journal, but only after removing the headline-grabbing claim about the origin of the virus.)

fullfact.org/health/richard…

In 2022, when a second paper by Dalgleish and Sørensen was rejected by Nature Medicine, Dearlove emailed executives at the publishing company, attempting to pressure them to overturn a decision made by the journal's editor based on peer review.

To state the obvious: this kind of behaviour threatens the integrity of the scientific publishing process - and is all the more alarming given that Dearlove has spent much of his post-MI6 career in academia.

(Dearlove served as Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge from 2005-2015, and is currently Chairman of the Board of Trustees of University of London.)

The 2016 Chilcot report concluded that "Sir Richard Dearlove's personal intervention, and its urgency, gave added weight to a report that had not been properly evaluated".

The report in question was, of course, about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction.

But the verdict applies just as well to Dearlove's hot-headed intervention into the scientific debate over the origins of Covid.

In comparison to the tragedy of the Iraq war, Dearlove's conduct in this saga may seem more silly than sinister.

But the fact that such a man still has the ear of government ministers is, in itself, a grotesque failure of political accountability.

computerweekly.com/news/366553435…

P.S. Obviously I just had to make a @My_Little_Crony-style visualisation for this story 😅

Find it embedded in the article, or the full size version here: sophie-e-hill.com/files/nature-n…

P.P.S. If you're wondering how the good folks at Computer Weekly were able to get this scoop and quote all those emails - check this out:
computerweekly.com/news/252525366…