Covid WAS clearly the result of genetic engineering in China. If the inquiry refuses to consider this, the hearings are pointless, says leading scientist PROF ANGUS DALGLEISH

The phrase is straight out of Yes Minister. Michael Gove's evidence to the Covid Inquiry on Tuesday was cut off for straying into what a smooth-talking Government lawyer deemed 'a somewhat divisive issue'.

Gove, a Cabinet minister for most of the past 13 years, ventured to state that 'there is a significant body of judgment that believes that the virus itself was man-made'.

This goes further than any British official has previously dared. Gove is an exceptionally clever man - and I have no doubt his intervention was deliberate. He has been long aware of the overwhelming evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, was genetically engineered to become a human pathogen in a laboratory in the city of Wuhan in China.

As Yes Minister's Sir Humphrey might put it, the Secretary of State apparently forgot what it was he wasn't supposed to know. In fact, what Gove called the 'significant body of judgment' is overwhelming.

Chinese molecular biologists took a coronavirus that occurs naturally in bats and altered its genes - to an extent that cannot occur naturally - so as to make it exceptionally contagious in humans.

Any notion that this novel coronavirus arose from contaminated bat meat sold in the wet market at Wuhan is a fairytale for the credulous, a juvenile explanation that insults the intelligence of every serious virologist.

The Chinese are to blame for the Covid pandemic and the deaths (estimated at seven million globally) and long-term illnesses it caused, as well as the incalculable damage to the world's economy - to the extent that it would not be inappropriate for nations to demand substantial reparations from Beijing.

The mere fact that this disease arose in the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Biology, China's premier top-level 'biosafety' laboratory, should be enough to make any investigator suspicious.

Yet shamefully, the Covid Inquiry lawyer Hugo Keith KC slapped down Mr Gove for even beginning to approach the subject.

Gove's point ought to be central to the Inquiry. He was admitting that the Government was 'not as well prepared as we should have been' because 'the virus was novel'. In other words, the medical establishment was blindsided. This virus was unprecedented because it was in part created by man.

All this I can say with certainty because I was the co-author of a scientific paper that first made Government officials aware of the facts, in March 2020.

Working with my colleague in Norway, Dr Birger Sorensen (with whom I had collaborated to improve his pioneering therapeutic HIV vaccine in 2006), we realised that the Covid virus was simply incompatible with natural evolution.

I discovered, to my intense frustration, that no major journal wanted to publish our evidence. Many claimed it was 'not in the public interest'. Nonetheless, my warnings about the origins of the virus brought me to the attention of the former chief of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove.

Understandably curious to know why an NHS cancer specialist was taking such an interest in Covid, he arranged for me to be quietly vetted, without my knowledge.

It gives me little pleasure that my bona fides were quickly established which helped persuade Dearlove that I was as a sceptical scientific voice whose findings were repeatedly ignored - and repeatedly shown to be right, far too late.

Like Cassandra in ancient myth, I have an unwelcome habit of telling my peers news that they do not want to hear.

When I applied to use immunotherapy for cancer patients, a decade before it became standard practice, my funding was refused. The body overseeing grants ruled that immunotherapy worked on mice but would be ineffective on humans. It is now one of the leading treatments for cancer.

Shock and disgust greeted my suggestion that thalidomide, the drug that did so much damage to unborn babies in the 1960s, might be adapted for other treatments. But after I provided my research to a U.S. company called Celgene, Lenalidomide was developed - now the frontline treatment for the blood cancer myeloma in the NHS.

Most pertinently, I was the first researcher to identify the role of a specific 'receptor' for the HIV virus. In simple terms, this receptor is a protein on the surface of a human cell that provides a gateway for a virus to enter and infect that cell, triggering disease.

It was this feature of SARS-CoV-2 that piqued my interest in Covid, as the 'spikes' on its surface serve a similar function, facilitating access for the virus to human cells.

Indeed, the giveaway that the Covid virus is man-made are those telltale receptors, one of which is known as the Furin Cleavage Site. HIV fixes mainly on to one receptor - but the Covid virus binds to several, allowing it to lock into cells in the nose, mouth, lungs and elsewhere in the body.

This gives the virus what we call a hypercharge, making it much more positively charged than any virus has been before.

Think of it like a fridge magnet, so powerful that it rips itself out of your hand and flies across the kitchen, landing hard enough to dent the metal. That's the hypercharge effect.

The Covid virus is designed for maximum impact - no such structure has occurred naturally in other coronaviruses.

And if that is not evidence enough, consider this: in 2013, molecular biologists in the Wuhan Institute announced that such a viral structure had been created by genetic modification in the lab. They openly admitted they were working on this technique to magnify the viral charge, in so-called 'gain-of-function' research.

So in SARS-CoV-2, we have a wildly contagious virus that mirrors man-made genetic mutations previously produced by scientists. And all of this happens in a city where China's foremost virus research labs are based, with some specialising in coronaviruses isolated from bats found in caves many hundreds of miles away from the city.

Michael Gove was warned not to speak of this because it was a 'somewhat divisive issue'. The only division, as far as I can see, is between the blatantly obvious and the wilfully blind.

If the Covid Inquiry was genuinely interested in discovering the truth behind the pandemic, the origin of this novel virus - and its intriguing genetic specificity - would be its main focus.

We have to find out why the Chinese government was funding such suicidally dangerous research, and to what extent Western governments, especially the Americans, knew about it - and whether or not, as has been suggested, they were actually contributing to research funding.

My own belief, given the close ties I know to exist between U.S. and Chinese virology scientists, is that there must have been close co-operation.

The big unanswered question is 'Why?'. The official explanation is that it was to promote vaccine research to prepare for a future coronavirus pandemic, without appreciating the irony that the research itself caused a pandemic.

Other people have pointed out that a bio-weapons research team is stationed in the Wuhan lab.

In addition, big pharmaceutical companies were interested in vaccine development, to prepare for a pandemic.

Mad scientists concocting deadly plagues in their laboratories are the stuff of B-movies. It's an image none of us wants to contemplate. But we have to face reality.

The SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes Covid was the result of genetic engineering. It is clearly a man-made disease.

If the public inquiry refuses to consider this, or even to allow the thought to be voiced, the hearings are pointless.

Professor Angus Dalgleish is the co-author, with Dr Steven Quay, of The Origin Of The Virus, published by Clinical Press.