The controversy surrounding the origins of COVID-19 has taken another dramatic turn with revelations that MI6, Britain's foreign intelligence service, may have known early on that the virus stemmed from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. According to a report from the Daily Mail published on 15 March 2025, a classified dossier compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, was delivered to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson in March 2020, just as the pandemic began to grip Europe. This dossier, marked "Secret – Recipient's Eyes Only," asserted with confidence that it was "beyond reasonable doubt" that Covid-19 had been engineered in the Wuhan facility and had escaped accidentally. Dearlove, drawing on input from distinguished academics and intelligence experts, argued that China had pushed a misleading narrative, suggesting the virus originated naturally in a Wuhan animal market, and had even tampered with viral samples to bolster this story.
The dossier landed on Johnson's desk at a critical moment, and Dearlove later claimed that the Prime Minister was personally convinced by its findings. Johnson, it seems, couldn't shake the nagging coincidence of a novel virus emerging in a city hosting a laboratory renowned for its work on bat coronaviruses. Despite this, the dossier's claims were met with resistance from within the UK government, particularly from Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser at the time, now Lord Vallance and a Labour science minister. Sources close to Johnson have pointed the finger at Vallance, accusing him of dismissing the lab-leak theory outright. The Daily Mail suggests this dismissal may have been motivated by a desire to avoid offending China, or to protect research funding ties with international partners, including American scientist Anthony Fauci, who has faced scrutiny over U.S. funding of bat virus research at the Wuhan lab.
This wasn't a one-off rejection. Johnson reportedly pressed intelligence agencies multiple times to dig deeper into the virus's origins, frustrated by what he saw as an inexplicable reluctance to explore the lab-leak hypothesis. Yet Vallance, a familiar face alongside Johnson during those early pandemic press conferences, is said to have brushed aside the dossier's warnings, possibly to maintain diplomatic harmony with Beijing. A source close to Johnson speculated that scientists, including Vallance, feared public backlash against "Frankenstein viruses" that could jeopardise their funding, while also tiptoeing around China's sensitivities—after all, a lab leak would pin the blame for millions of deaths and trillions in economic damage on Wuhan's doorstep, upsetting the Chinese overlords.
The pushback didn't stop with Vallance. The UK's scientific establishment, according to Dearlove, had already bought into China's market-origin tale by early 2020. In April of that year, the government's Cobra committee branded the lab-leak idea a "conspiracy theory," effectively sidelining MI6's intelligence. Vallance himself claims he never saw the dossier but says he flagged the lab-leak possibility to the UK National Security Adviser in January 2020—before collaborating on a paper that dampened debate about the virus's origins, despite knowing a lab leak was plausible. This contradiction has only fuelled the fire.
Beyond the UK, other intelligence agencies lent weight to the lab-leak theory. Germany's Federal Intelligence Service (BND) ran a covert operation dubbed "Saaremaa" in 2020, concluding with 80-95 percent certainty that a lab leak was to blame, citing safety lapses at the Wuhan Institute. Yet the German Chancellery kept this under wraps, much like the UK's initial silence. In the U.S., former CDC director Robert Redfield has gone on record asserting total confidence that the virus came from lab-infected scientists, while the U.S. State Department issued internal warnings about the Wuhan lab as early as April 2020. Even so, the theory faced a wall of resistance, with figures like Fauci allegedly steering the narrative toward a natural zoonotic origin—an animal market spillover—rather than a lab mishap.
The Daily Mail paints this as a saga of suppression, with Vallance and others in the scientific elite accused of burying inconvenient truths to shield China and preserve international research ties. Johnson, for his part, stuck to his guns. In his memoir Unleashed, he doubles down, calling the pandemic "entirely man-made" and "overwhelmingly likely" the result of a botched Wuhan experiment. The article suggests this early MI6 dossier, combined with Johnson's persistence, clashed with a scientific community nervous about rocking the boat—whether to avoid offending China or to protect their own interests.
What emerges is a tangled web of intelligence, politics, and science. The claim that MI6 knew the virus was lab-engineered as early as March 2020, only to be stifled by Vallance and others wary of China's reaction, raises thorny questions about transparency and accountability. If true, it suggests a deliberate choice to prioritise diplomacy over disclosure, even as the pandemic spiralled; more fear of the wrath of communist China by the white mice of the West.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14503159/Labour-Wuhan-lab-leak-pandemic-Boris-johnson.html