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In private, they said it was plausible. In public, they called it a conspiracy theory. My article for Spiked: In August 2007 there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth virus on a farm in Surrey. It was a few miles from the world’s leading reference laboratory for identifying outbreaks of foot and mouth. Nobody thought this […]

That senior scientists saw evidence for theories that they trashed in public has shattered trust in science My article for the Telegraph: Inch by painful inch, the truth is being dragged out about how this pandemic started. It is just about understandable, if not forgivable, that Chinese scientists have obfuscated vital information about early cases […]

My article for Spectator: My wife and I were lucky to escape for a long-delayed birdwatching holiday in Kenya over Christmas. To have been warm, sunlit and free while so many in Britain were not won’t endear me to most readers, I realise. Nairobi was rife with Covid and Christmas cancellations devastated the tourism industry. […]

Our Testimony for the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons, This morning, Viral co-author Alina Chan and I testified before Parliament—specifically, the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons—on the search for the origin of COVID-19. It’s available to watch (and share) on YouTube, and we have shared clips on […]

The infection took place in a Biosafety Level 3 lab According to Taiwan News, and since picked up by Western media, a (recent) SARS-Cov-2 lab leak has been confirmed in (the Republic of) China. SARS-Cov-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19. The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) concluded on Saturday (Dec. 11) that an assistant […]

Thanks to your help, my new book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, co-authored with MIT scientist Alina Chan, is picking up a lot of steam in America. As I have mentioned before, I co-authored Viral—which tells the fascinating and heroic story of those searching for the origin of the pandemic, despite the […]

Storm Arwen showed the value of gas stoves and diesel, and the folly of our national forestry policy My article for the Telegraph: The one thing that cheered us Northumbrians up as we waited for power to come back on after Storm Arwen (some wit points out that naming these daughters of Boreas only seems […]

Their hasty over-reaction to the arrival of a new variant reflects just how little we truly understand this virus My article for the Telegraph: Here we go again, fighting the last war. Because governments are perceived to have moved too slowly to ban flights when the delta variant arose in India, we jumped into action […]

If you don’t subscribe to the new newsletter or follow me on Facebook and Twitter, you may not have heard: My new book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, co-authored with the young and brilliant scientist Alina Chan, published this day last week and is now available to purchase. Less than a week […]

Until we can rule out a laboratory origin for Covid, we must act as if it may have happened My article for the Telegraph: It is almost exactly two years since the pandemic began. According to an official document seen by the South China Morning Post, the first retrospectively diagnosed case of Covid in Wuhan […]