Spike: The Virus vs. The People - the Inside Story – Sage Scientist’s Revelatory Covid Memoir -- Jeremy Farrar -- October 15, 2022

See this post and chapter 23 specifically of that book.

From The [London] Guardian: link here.

Nor does Farrar seek to evade his own blindspots. Though he was not present at the Sage meetings in February 2020 when Chinese-style lockdowns were first mooted, he acknowledges that the idea you could tell the citizens of mature European democracies not to leave their homes was met with “disbelief, including from me”.

Farrar is similarly honest about his other biases and in a reflective passage on his initial willingness to entertain the laboratory conspiracy theory, he admits: “I had put two and two together and made five.” But perhaps the bigger surprise, given the fact that in February 2020 Farrar had lent his name to a controversial letter in the Lancet “strongly” condemning speculation about Covid’s non-natural origins, is that he entertained the theory at all (in a rare oversight, Farrar and Ahuja fail to mention the Lancet letter).I suspect these passages will prove the most controversial, particularly given the Biden administration’s recent decision to reopen the lab leak investigation and the recent publication of a follow-up Lancet letter in which Farrar and other prominent scientists reaffirm their view that the weight of “credible”, peer-reviewed scientific evidence points to a natural origin.

Certainly, as a long-time Farrar watcher (disclosure: some of my research has been supported by the Wellcome Trust and I’ve also interviewed Farrar for my podcast), I was astonished to learn that a month before the publication of the first Lancet letter Farrar had scheduled a confidential call with Anthony Fauci, the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to discuss the evidence for and against the lab leak theory, after which Farrar was still split 50-50. Equally astonishing is the revelation that he was so spooked by the possibility that the virus was human-made that he raised it with Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of M15 and a Wellcome trustee (it was Manningham-Buller who advised Farrar to get a burner phone and beef up his security). Indeed, the most compelling passages of Spike are where Farrar, skilfully aided by Ahuja, takes us through the complex scientific case for and against the lab leak theory, as he wrestles with his conscience and who he should let in on the secret lest something ill should befall him. John le Carré couldn’t have plotted it better.

Despite this, many readers may feel Farrar’s conclusion is a bit of a cop-out – without access to the laboratory records, he says, we may never be able to definitively rule out the lab leak theory “but the simplest explanation remains the likeliest: nature plus bad luck”. No less easy is the question whether Farrar would have done better to break ranks with Boris Johnson’s government earlier. “Does staying in an advisory role mean being complicit in the outcomes of bad decisions?” he asks at one point.

I believe Farrar when he says he still doesn’t know the answer, but after reading this searing indictment of the government’s serial failures to follow the science, I can’t be the only reader who wishes he’d written it sooner.