As the Trust the Science! revelations about the Covid coverups reverberate through social media, we are starting to hear from people whose further insights round out the picture. One of them is science writer Matt Ridley, co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, with Alina Chan.

Ridley long suspected that a lab leak was the most likely origin of Covid and that the idea was played down for political reasons. Now that Covid czar Anthony Fauci’s workplace “diary” has been released, it turns out that many top scientists suspected that too.

Why did top scientists suspect a lab leak? In a long essay at Spiked Online, Ridley offers some helpful specifics, especially about the furin cleavage site:

… [Fauci] convened a group of 12 scientists, most of whom thought it possible, perhaps even probable, that the virus had been engineered in a laboratory, to discuss their concerns. He then tasked four of the fairly junior ones in the meeting (a fifth author joined later), some of whom depended on grants from his agency, to write a paper, ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’. This paper outright dismissed the possibility of a lab leak as the origin of Covid. He and Jeremy Farrar, the then director of the Wellcome Trust, edited and promoted the publication of that paper. Fauci then disguised his own role in doing so, and spoke about it from the podium of the White House as if he had nothing to do with it.

Before and after they wrote the paper its authors all thought a lab leak was possible, perhaps even likely, as their private messages have repeatedly confirmed. Here’s what the lead author, Kristian Andersen, said the day after the meeting:

“The main issue is that accidental escape is in fact highly likely – it’s not some fringe theory. I absolutely agree that we can’t prove one way or the other, but we never will be able to – however, that doesn’t mean that by default the data [are] currently much more suggestive of a natural origin as opposed to [for example] passage. It is not – the furin cleavage site is very hard to explain.”

“Fauci and the great Covid cover-up” July 31, 2025

The furin cleavage site?

(Andersen’s concern about the furin cleavage site is important to note. Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology are known to have planned to insert a furin cleavage site into the spike gene of a SARS-related virus, in order to increase infectivity in human beings but not bats. All you really need to know about furin cleavage sites is that Covid is the first and only SARS-related virus, out of many hundreds that have been described, ever to show up with a furin cleavage site in its spike gene.) “Great Covid cover-up”

Interestingly, a 2021 paper in Stem Cell Research asserts that “Furin cleavage sites naturally occur” in coronaviruses and a letter to Lancet in August 2023 attributes the furin cleavage to “natural selection.” Even so, human intervention was intended in the Wuhan work and thus cannot be ruled out for Covid.

A deafening legacy media chorus did rule it out, of course, in favor of animal-to-human transmission (the wet market origin). But, Ridley notes, after all this time, there is no evidence that humans are getting Covid from animals (zoonotic origin).

Where it gets really interesting is why Fauci might take this stand

Ridley has a theory:

What was Fauci’s motive for misleading the world? That is clear as a bell: he had spent decades championing the idea that gain-of-function research on risky viruses was a good idea, even as others expressed serious doubts …

So Fauci knew from then onwards that if a lab leak looked plausible, his own role in godfathering the research would come out. He had to keep a lid on it for a few weeks until the outbreak petered out. Only it did not peter out. It turned into a three-year ordeal that killed 20million people and turned the world economy upside down. “Great Covid cover-up”

Was that his reason? We may never know. If he talked about anything like that in his enormous “diary,” no one has found it yet. Other revelations continue to pour in though.

Incidentally, here at Mind Matters News, we assembled available evidence for the lab leak theory two years ago.

Legacy media, not too surprisingly, continue to try to keep the Fauci legend alive. That may be something their readers need. That is, they may need “The Science” to seem trustworthy even if it obviously isn’t. Some facts just don’t bear much thinking about.