
The editor of one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals has admitted it took more than a year to declare the conflict of interests of a scientist who denounced the Covid lab leak theory and called anyone who questioned the official Chinese narrative a conspiracy theorist.
Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, said it took 16 months to publish an official conflict of interest statement in which he revealed Peter Daszak had links to the Wuhan laboratory at the centre of the spillover theory.
Dr Daszak organised the letter in February 2020, co-signed by 26 other leading researchers which condemned ‘conspiracy theories’ that Covid did not arise naturally.
The move is claimed to have shut down any debate over whether the virus could have escaped from a lab last year. But the zoologist, a Lancastrian who now lives in New York, had ties to Wuhan Institute of Virology stretching back 15 years.