Hancock 'was told to stop criticising China'over his Covid concerns

Matt Hancock ‘was told to stop criticising China over his concerns that Covid begun from a lab leak in Wuhan’, leaked WhatsApps reveal

•  Matt Hancock was ordered to tone down his comments about the virus’s origins
•  He said he treated the official version of events with ‘considerable scepticism’

Matt Hancock was censored by Whitehall officials over his concerns that Covid-19 may have begun from a lab leak in Wuhan, it emerged last night.

The former health secretary wrote in his book that it was ‘too much of a coincidence’ to believe the pandemic started in a market not far from a Chinese government’s biological research facility.

He said he treated the official version of events with ‘considerable scepticism’ and claimed similar claims by the British would have been ‘laughed out of town’.

But Mr Hancock was ordered to tone down his comments about the virus’s origins because the Government was worried it would ‘cause problems’ with Beijing, The Daily Telegraph reported. 

He also wanted to write that ‘global fear of the Chinese must not get in the way of a full investigation’ – but this too was watered down. 

Matt Hancock was censored by Whitehall officials over his concerns that Covid-19 may have begun from a lab leak in Wuhan, it emerged last night

The changes were made when he submitted the manuscript of his Pandemic Diaries book to the Cabinet Office for review, as all former ministers are required to do. 

After the required alterations were made, it was signed off for publication by under-fire Cabinet Secretary Simon Case in November.

The Government has tried to avoid commenting publicly on the suspicion that the deadly virus may have escaped from a laboratory, although in the United States, both the FBI and the Department for Energy now believe the theory is plausible.

In the first of the extracts from his book that the Cabinet Office objected to, Mr Hancock originally wrote: ‘Given how cagey the Chinese have been, I think we have to treat their official version of events – still the Wuhan thing – with considerable scepticism.’

He said that if a ‘deadly new virus’ had emerged in Wiltshire, yet the British ‘shrugged off’ the fact that it was near chemical warfare research facility Porton Down, ‘we’d be laughed out of town’.

‘Global fear of the Chinese must not get in the way of a full investigation into what happened,’ he urged.

But the published version simply stated: ‘Though the international consensus and the Government’s position is that the virus originated at the Wuhan wet market, I remain sceptical. There must be a full investigation into what happened.’

In the interim, the Cabinet Office had told Mr Hancock: ‘This is highly sensitive and would cause problems if released.’

Mr Hancock was ordered to tone down his comments about the virus’s origins because the Government was worried it would ‘cause problems’ with Beijing

He was told: ‘Must be clearer that it is supposition rather than revealing any confidential information received from inside government. Should also be clear that this is not (the Government’s) views or beliefs.’

In another section, Mr Hancock originally wrote: ‘To me it seems pretty credible. It’s just too much of a coincidence that the pandemic started in the same city as the lab, which – by the way, is a full 40 minutes drive from the wet market originally linked to the outbreak. The only plausible alternative is that the virus was brought to Wuhan to be studied, and then escaped.’

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