Fake News on Wuhan Lab Spread by MI6, Disputed by German Virologist Drosten

Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of British secret service MI6, has surfaced yet again to peddle the line that the Covid19 virus was likely “man-made”, and had escaped from the research laboratory in Wuhan. Back in June 2020, he was one
of the first to make the claim, while demanding that China be
forced to pay reparations worldwide for the damage caused. In an interview on June 2 with the Daily Telegraph’s podcast Planet Normal, Her Majesty’s former chief spy escalated his attack on China, noting the evidence of a lab leak has likely been destroyed in the meantime.

“We don’t know that’s what’s happened,” he admitted, “ but a lot of data has probably been destroyed or made to disappear so it’s going to be difficult to prove definitely the case for a gain-of-function chimera being the cause of the pandemic.” How convenient! By assuming the evidence has been destroyed, British intelligence does not have to present proof of its claim. (By the way, it was the same MI6 headed by Sir Richard Dearlove that assured the world, back in 2002, that Saddam Hussein had weaons of mass destruction, which was later proved to be a deliberate fabrication.)

Sir Richard went on to pest against Beijing for many other reasons, confirming the purely geopolitical nature of the current campaign around the Wuhan lab. A campaign which has also targeted Dr. Anthony Fauci in the United States.

In an interview with the Swiss online magazine Republik on June 5, Berlin virologist Christian Drosten, one of the world leading experts on SARS viruses, took a different view of the matter. While it may be possible to accidentally or intentionally create SARS-2 from a purely technical standpoint, he said, if that were the case, “I’d say they did it in a pretty tortuous way.” Starting from the first SARS virus as a basis, one would only have to make very specific, minor changes to find out whether such an adaptation would render the virus more infectious. “But the whole backbone of SARS-CoV-2 is completely different. It is full of deviations from the first virus,” Drosten explained.

He then illustrated what he meant with a simple example: To “check whether adaptations make the virus more contagious, I would take an existing system, put the change in there, and then compare that to the old system. If I want to know if a new car radio improves the sound, I take an existing car and change its radio. Then I compare. I don’t build a completely new car for that. But that’s exactly how it was with SARS-2: The whole car is different.”

Also the idea of a research accident is “extremely unlikely” for him, because it would be much too laborious. As for any malicious deployment of a secret laboratory, one would ultimately have to ask the intelligence agencies: “If anything, something like that probably wouldn’t come out of the Wuhan Virology Institute,” he said. “That’s a serious academic institute.”

The whole interview in German at  https://www.republik.ch/2021/06/05/herr-drosten-woher-kam-dieses-virus