“Since the earliest days of the pandemic there were a small number of leading scientists who took it upon themselves to enforce this kind of orthodoxy,” said Jamie Metzl, adviser to the World Health Organisation (WHO) on human genome editing and senior fellow with the Atlantic Council think tank. “We were ostracised and called conspiracy theorists,” he added. Metzl said that a statement in The Lancet in February 2020, signed by 27 prominent scientists, was “a form of scientific thuggery”. It strongly condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”. It was organised by Peter Daszak,...