If Omicron had been the first Covid strain to emerge in Wuhan in 2020, there could have been significantly more deaths worldwide, an eminent immunologist has said.
Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford, said the impact of the pandemic “could have been a lot worse” with the highly infectious variant.
He was speaking after comments by former Chinese government scientist Prof George Gao, who said the possibility the coronavirus leaked from a laboratory should not be ruled out.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Sir John said he did not think the evidence of whether it emerged from a lab, or naturally, was conclusive either way.
“I would put it to you that it actually doesn’t make any difference,” he said. “We know historically that we do get pathogens that come from the animal kingdom that get into man that cause these sorts of outbreaks.
“And we also know that labs that look after these very pathogenic viruses do leak.”
How the world responds to be ready for another pandemic is most important, he said.
Sir John said he had recently held a meeting attended by Prof Gao, at which Covid modelling by a company called Airfinity was discussed.
“They did the modelling around the idea that if the first virus that appeared in Wuhan had not been the Wuhan strain, but had been the Omicron strain, which we all know is much, much more infectious,” he said. “And that had hit an immunologically naive population, in other words a population that had never seen the virus before.
“The peak mortality in the UK would have been about five times what it was with the originally Wuhan strain. Remember those were pretty dark times during April and May of 2020 and I don’t think we would have wanted five times the number of people dying.
“And had it been Avian flu it would have been 15 times [higher]. So I think when we hear that there is a great pandemic coming, if either one of those things were to happen, it would be a great deal worse than what we saw.”
In an interview with the BBC, Prof Gao told Radio 4 podcast Fever: The Hunt for Covid's Origin: “You can always suspect anything. That's science. Don't rule out anything.”
Prof Gao is now vice president of the National Natural Science Foundation of China after retiring last year from the CDC, where he played a key role in the pandemic response and efforts to trace how it started.
The theory that Covid leaked accidentally from a Chinese lab resurfaced in February when the FBI's director Christopher Wray said this was where the virus had “most likely” originated, although there is no consensus among US intelligence agencies on the matter.
The Voice of Hind Rajab
Starring: Saja Kilani, Clara Khoury, Motaz Malhees
Director: Kaouther Ben Hania
Rating: 4/5
Wicked: For Good
Director: Jon M Chu
Starring: Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Jonathan Bailey, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Ethan Slater
Rating: 4/5
The Two Popes
Director: Fernando Meirelles
Stars: Anthony Hopkins, Jonathan Pryce
Four out of five stars
New UK refugee system
- A new “core protection” for refugees moving from permanent to a more basic, temporary protection
- Shortened leave to remain - refugees will receive 30 months instead of five years
- A longer path to settlement with no indefinite settled status until a refugee has spent 20 years in Britain
- To encourage refugees to integrate the government will encourage them to out of the core protection route wherever possible.
- Under core protection there will be no automatic right to family reunion
- Refugees will have a reduced right to public funds
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
The biog
Favourite film: Motorcycle Dairies, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Kagemusha
Favourite book: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Holiday destination: Sri Lanka
First car: VW Golf
Proudest achievement: Building Robotics Labs at Khalifa University and King’s College London, Daughters
Driverless cars or drones: Driverless Cars
