AN COLÚN: Let’s dive into the Covid rabbit hole

LET US dive into the Covid rabbit hole. It’s a place of smoke and mirrors, obfuscation, tinfoil hat conspiracy theories, judgements without compassion or insight, and a profoundly worrying lack of closure. There’s no great Eureka moment when all is revealed, because it’s overshadowed by the Chinese Communist Party which decided to cover things up rather than come clean (the kind of behaviour that we expect from dictatorships).

Here’s the bones of what I’ve learned so far. I’ll keep it as simple and to the point as possible and try to avoid the temptation of disappearing into any other burrow holes that we meet along the way.

In January 2025 the CIA stated that it was “more likely” that Covid emanated from a lab in Wuhan, China, rather than from a natural animal origin. A number of prominent intelligence agencies now agree that a lab leak is indeed more likely, a theory which for years beforehand had been denounced as being the domain of off-kilter conspiracy theorists.

Covid killed millions of people throughout the world and caused trillions of Euros in economic damage. For years the scientific establishment said it was most likely transmitted to humans by zoonotic tranmission, that is from bats to humans, in the wet market in Wuhan. However, this overlooked the “missing link virus” which would have explained the connection between bats and humans. This “missing link virus” was never found. It was also never revealed which animals in the wet market might have transmitted the bat virus.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology sits just across the Yangtze River from where the first Covid cases emerged. It’s a Level 4 Biohazard Lab and it specialises in Bat Coronaviruses. It has the largest collection of Bat virus samples in the world. Before the Covid outbreak there were concerns about the lab’s safety protocols and untrained staff. A US team which visited in 2018 raised concerns about this. They talked about the risk of a SARS-like pandemic breaking out from the lab due to inadequate procedures. The lab’s lead researcher discovered a similar virus to Covid 19 back in 2013. Her team were creating hybrid versions capable of infecting human cells. American and European taxpayers helped to fund this research.

In July 2020 Kristian Andersen, a prominent scientist, wrote that the virus had “unusual features that potentially look engineered” and didn’t fit evolutionary patterns. However, shortly afterwards an influential paper in Nature magazine said this “engineered” theory was “not plausible.” However, privately, many respected scientists said it was a plausible theory. Publicly, the pressure to conform to the “acceptable” theory of the “wet market / natural origin” was extremely strong. Some scientists feared losing financial supports if they didn’t conform. It wasn’t until 2021 that cracks began to appear in this whitewashing of the facts. In May 2021 the Wall Street Journal published a sceptical article; and this mood of scepticism was emulated thereafter by a growing number of media outlets.

The conclusion arising from all of this is depressing: Today the world remains at significant risk of facing another pandemic, and geopolitical friction regarding the origins of Covid complicates efforts to maximise global safety. A number of laboratories are handling dangerous pathogens and the risk of accidental laboratory leaks remains a serious concern. (Just to be clear, I think the Wuhan lab virus was accidentally, not intentionally, unleashed upon the world).

Here in Ireland sending nursing home residents to hospitals during Covid might have saved lives by providing access to advanced medical care like oxygen and critical support. However, our public health policy focussed heavily on protecting acute hospitals from a surge, leaving many residents to be treated inside under resourced residential facilities. Hospitals had mechanical ventilators, high-flow oxygen, and intravenous treatments that most nursing homes lacked. Many nursing homes also faced severe staff shortages when workers fell ill or had to isolate. Hospitals also had better PPE and isolation facilities. In Ireland there were a total of 9,358 Covid deaths with nearly 30% of those deaths occurring in residential institutions such as nursing homes.

During Covid I looked favourably at Sweden’s response to the pandemic and wished I lived there. In Sweden’s system it was harder to strip people’s rights away from them. When I said this to people the response was to invariably dismiss Sweden’s approach and not even countenance the possibility of it being an effective measure. Sweden did not roll out a series of Lockdowns. Instead, life was allowed to proceed as normal. Schools and businesses were kept open (avoiding the psychological and economic suffering experienced in the Lockdown countries). The country’s approach was to avoid coercive legal measures and rely more on public guidance and personal responsibility. Initially this policy seemed to be failing. The country suffered a high death toll in long-term care facilities during the first wave in spring 2020, incurring a lot of criticism from other countries. However, the country’s total death rate from 2020 to 2022 was the lowest in Europe, with a rate of 4.4%. Over the same period Italy’s death rate was 12.3%; France was 9.2%, Germany 8.6% and Norway 5%. The average rate in Europe was 11.1%. After 3 years of Covid the Swedish economy was in a better place than the rest of the Eurozone. It was also found that Swedish children were on track when it came to “literacy metrics.”