Jeremy Farrar’s account of the spread of the pandemic, in particular his view of government policy and fears about the virus’s origins, is genuinely shocking
It cannot be easy keeping confidences when your whole scientific career has been predicated on the transparent sharing of data. But this is the bind that Jeremy Farrar, the director of the Wellcome Trust and a prominent government scientific adviser, found himself in on learning in January 2020 that Chinese scientists had isolated a novel coronavirus in Wuhan with an unusual constellation of genes.
Within days, Farrar, an infectious disease clinician by training, had obtained the virus’s genetic sequence and knew it was related to Sars, the cause of a major global outbreak in 2002-2003. And within weeks, Farrar knew it was being transmitted from person to person and had “the makings of a nightmare”. More concerning still, Sars-CoV-2, as the virus came to be known, “seemed almost designed to infect human cells”, raising the possibility it might have accidentally or deliberately escaped from a laboratory.
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