We blew the whistle on the Covid lab leak five years ago and were written off as cranks

Telegraph

19-03-2025

If they're supposed to be members of a band of truculent conspiracy theorists intent on disrupting the machine of the state, Prof Gwythian Prins and John Constable don't exactly seem like it.
'In some sense we're all classic establishment figures… but slightly to one side of it,' Constable says, an observation at which Prins nods vigorously. Turning up at a pub just off Trafalgar Square (where Whitehall meets Clubland and visitors to the country mingle with the people who run it) the two men are immaculately turned out and mildly uneasy.
Leather-backed armchairs are found; a pot of tea ordered. Prins, 74, is, among a catalogue of other things, the emeritus research professor at the London School of Economics. Constable, 61, is an academic, analyst and the founder of the Renewable Energy Foundation. They are not naturally keen on the spotlight, they insist, yet have come because, Prins says, 'this is a very important story which must be heard'.
It relates to a specific sequence of events during the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic, but really, it's about how the British government and Civil Service operates these days. Or rather, how it doesn't operate. 'But we'll come to that,' Prins says.
This Sunday marks five years since Boris Johnson appeared on television live from Downing Street to announce a nationwide lockdown in a bid to stop the coronavirus outbreak. It was the most significant set of restrictions on British life in living memory, and rendered much of the country catatonic.
Yet while most people outside of government and vital services were forced to put their lives on hold, others were energised to put their talents and expertise towards finding out about the virus. Prins, whose long career has primarily focused on history and geopolitics, including social epidemiology, was one of them. So too Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), whom Prins had met while carrying out work for the Ministry of Defence, where Prins sat on an advisory panel to the Chief of the Defence Staff. The immunologist Prof Angus Dalgleish and the Norwegian virologist Birger Sørensen were also part of the group.
They had, in fact, all been in communication as early as January 2020, when whispers about SARS‑CoV‑2 – the virus which causes Covid-19 – were spreading almost as fast as the virus itself. 'Soon after the announcements began to be made, Gus Dalgleish called me up and said his colleague, Sørensen, had done the single most obvious thing,' Prins says. As much of Europe focused on how to contain the spread of Covid, Sørensen began to analyse the virus itself.
Sørensen's early research would eventually lead to the conclusion that SARS‑CoV‑2 was engineered during 'gain of function' experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Somehow, it must have escaped. This was essentially the 'lab leak theory', which was instantly mooted when the pandemic started and just as quickly dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Instead, the established narrative proclaimed that the likely starting point was contact between wild creatures and humans in a Wuhan wet market where early Covid cases were identified.
'There have been longstanding concerns in the virological community about the relative laxity in standards in Chinese laboratories,' Prins says. Accidents can happen. 'These things happen. It happened in this country at Pirbright with the foot-and-mouth epidemic. Human error.'
Given what he knew about China's interest in biological weapons, Prins found the lab theory 'of sufficient interest' to give Sir Richard Dearlove a ring, who gathered this growing team together. Constable joined later, as did an anonymous civil servant.
By this point it was early March and the 'wet market theory' was becoming cemented in the public's perception as ground zero in the emerging pandemic. Governments were beginning to shut down their countries, creating policies on the fly and attempting to not contradict one another too much.
Concerned, Dearlove and Prins's team felt they needed to do something 'rather more formal' than simply look into the virus and hope the government would reach the same conclusion, especially as they believed their findings would be relevant to decisions made about how best to protect the population and how to quickly develop a safe vaccine.
So in March 2020, they sent to Downing Street two top secret documents titled An Urgent Briefing for the Prime Minister and his Advisers, which outlined their belief that SARS‑CoV‑2 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute, and countered many of the opinions held by experts on different elements of the Covid story.
The first briefing, solely about the makeup of the virus and proposing a 'Norwegian vaccine' based on Sørensen's research, 'was presented to Number 10 not as an opportunity to say, 'Abandon everything else', but just to say 'You really should put this vaccine into your portfolio'. And that didn't happen', says Prins.
The second briefing, sent 10 days after the first and received four days after the announcement of lockdown, was allegedly seen and believed by Boris Johnson. 'We know that,' Prins says. 'But he now says, 'I couldn't resist my advisers'. Well, for me that's not a very convincing answer. You're the prime minister of the United Kingdom, to govern is to choose, you are there to decide what to do.'
Prins says he has since learnt that Johnson 'asked for redoubled efforts to discover whether what we were saying was true – and the result of those enquiries was to trash us and say that we're all conspiracy theorists or something'.
Constable's major contribution to the team's work was to discover a different potential index case in Britain, or 'patient zero', which could have proved the virus reached these shores more than six weeks earlier than the official line.
It in fact involved The Telegraph. Scanning the comments under an article written by Dalgleish one day, he found a subscriber who claimed that he and his secretary both had Covid-like symptoms as early as October or November 2019.
The man, whom he tracked down with the help of a Telegraph journalist, then put him in touch with the people he thought had infected him, '[who] turned out to be a family of international business people who travel regularly from the Far East to Britain,' says Constable. 'They'd come for a shooting party in Wiltshire, and many people at this party had gone down with symptoms they subsequently recognised as likely to be coronavirus.'
Constable persuaded the family to be tested, in the name of public interest, packaged this all up – their names, contacts, their story, the fact that they were willing to help – and passed it on to Number 10. 'And they did absolutely nothing. So because the tests were never done, we'll never know for sure.'
Constable may have been entirely wrong, but he finds it alarming that he was dismissed out of hand. 'Whatever the general picture, you have a series of novel pieces of information being provided by a research group with a different perspective, producing points which would be novel and relevant and would have been important, if they'd been taken into account, and they were all neglected,' he says.
None of this would be public – it was marked 'top secret', after all – had Prins's supposedly encrypted email account not been hacked in 2022 by a Russian group working for the FSB security service. He is 'very careful' with his communications, preferring to use Signal, an encrypted messaging and calls app, and Proton Mail, an encrypted email service, yet it didn't stop the hackers.
A trove of Prins's emails, including 'a mixture of things that were correct, like this report, and a lot of stuff that was made up', were made public. It led to a slew of coverage, in the shadier outcrops of the internet, of the group's activities.
'If you believe them, I am a black spider at the centre of a Right-wing conspiracy theory to control the entire Western world,' Prins says.
Constable waits a beat. 'Would that it were true…' Prins nods.
So the team now regards their warnings as public documents, and on the fifth anniversary, have decided to talk about it, not least because, says Prins, everything 'that has happened in the last five years has made me and the rest of the team increasingly furious, because our advice was not taken'.
The lab leak theory is just one element of the briefings which has been subject to a significant shift in public (and official) perception over the last few years. Once viewed as the preserve of cranks, it has slowly pulled up to the wet markets theory and now overtaken it as the prevailing explanation for the virus's origins.
The New York Times recently changed its tune on the matter. And the CIA said on Saturday that the Sars-Cov-2 coronavirus was 'more likely' to have a 'research-related' origin than a natural one, even if it had 'low confidence' in its conclusion.
Full-scale lockdowns, the PPE debacle, the care homes crisis and almost every other aspect of the government's response to Covid has been a point of debate ever since the pandemic ended. The ongoing Covid inquiry rarely makes for comfortable viewing for anybody involved in the pandemic response at a governmental level.
Invariably, it vindicates Dearlove and Prins's team – not least in shining a light on the 'false groupthink' that Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson's former chief adviser, later identified as paralysing Downing Street during the early months of the pandemic.
Prins and Constable are not here to name and shame individual ministers or even scientists – though they do say Sir Patrick Vallance, as the government's chief scientific adviser at the time, should 'carry the can' for blind spots – but are instead here to point out a systemic problem.
'This is about what's happened to our country, to our people, to our children,' Prins says.
'And we don't want it to happen again,' Constable adds.
The team they assembled were not all scientists. 'The only thing we have in common is high IQ, I think,' Constable says.
'I think that's basically it,' Prins agrees. 'All of us [are] awkward customers, and extremely clever. That's what you need if you're going to have safe policy. It's true in any area but it's especially true in an area like this where lives are at stake.
'And that's what makes us so disappointed – I'll just use that rather low-grade word – that even with the qualifications that we carried with us, even with the fact that the prime minister of the day subsequently told us, directly, that he'd read this and was persuaded, the reaction was basically to shut us out and shut us down, and prevent any of our material being published.'
Prins believes Johnson 'came back to work far too early' after his brush with death from Covid, and should instead have 'gone to Chequers and gone to bed, and read Tacitus, or written his Shakespeare book, and let someone else run the country'.
Constable insists that the men want no credit, no recognition, no apology. They may well have been proven wrong on a lot of things, but the alarming thing, they believe, is that they weren't even heard.
'We're not trivial people, we're not time-wasters, we went through a lot of trouble to do this and it was ignored, and subsequent events have shown it was a great pity that we were ignored,' he says.
'My general consideration is that we can see something wrong with our governmental mechanism. It's not sensitive to information because it becomes locked within a particular tunnel vision, and cannot digest, or even see contrary information… Which is fascinating. And very worrying.'