IDS pledges new probe into Wuhan Covid ‘leak’

A FULL Parliamentary investigation into the origins of Covid will be held if former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith is elected to run a powerful Commons committee.

Sir Iain, who is the frontrunner to succeed Tom Tugendhat as head of the Foreign Affairs Committee next month, has privately vowed to hold an inquiry into growing evidence that Covid leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, where the pandemic was first detected.

The Tory grandee told friends of his intention to act after The Lancet medical journal conceded for the first time that the pandemic could have been sparked by a leak.

The Lancet, which printed an article in 2020 condemning suggestions of a lab leak as ‘conspiracy theories’, now says the world should take the hypothesis ‘seriously’.

It also suggested the virus could be linked to US laboratories.

Scientists in Wuhan were involved in collaborative projects funded by Washington, running experiments that can potentially boost the infectiousness of viruses.

The funding was axed after The Mail on Sunday revealed in April 2020 that the US-funded research in Wuhan focused on bats caught 1,000 miles away in Yunnan.

Some Covid experts suspect China might ‘pivot’ away from its denial that the virus leaked from its Wuhan lab, but will limit its culpability by partly blaming America.

In an article for The MoS last year, Sir Iain wrote: ‘Governments across the globe – many in the media, too, with the notable exception of this newspaper – seem to have given up on trying to get to the truth about Covid and understand how our world was turned upside down.

‘There has been a major cover-up in China over this.’

The committee chairman will be elected on October 12. Other candidaes include Tory MPs Liam Fox, Alicia Kearns, John Baron and Richard Graham.