Top science journal faced secret attacks from Covid conspiracy theory group

Additional research: Simone Bateson. IT support: Matthew Fowler. Interactive graphics: Sophie Hill

One of the world’s most prestigious general science journals, Nature, was the target of a two-year-long sustained and virulent secret attack by a conspiratorial group of extreme Brexit lobbyists with high-level political, commercial and intelligence connections, according to documents and correspondence examined by Computer Weekly and Byline Times.

The group attempted to have Nature and its staff put under surveillance and investigated by MI5, MI6, the CIA, Mossad, and Japanese and Australian intelligence agencies. They met Cabinet minister Michael Gove and later asked him to arrange phone taps and electronic surveillance. One member of the group led intrusive investigations into the intimate personal life and background circumstances of senior Nature staff the group suspected of “extreme Sinophile views”.

When their campaign flopped and a Covid vaccine promoted by the group failed to reach any form of clinical testing, the group arranged for unfounded accusations against Nature magazines and staff to be published by the Daily Telegraph and on other right wing news sites. They called themselves the “Covid Hunters”. Their allegations against science reporting helped fuel an explosion in “lab leak” claims on right-wing conspiracy sites.

Pushing their “extraordinary, true story” to a top Hollywood producer in 2020, the group wrote self-adulatory biographies and explained how fate had brought them together (see box: Covid Hunter heroes who became victims). The movie proposal portrayed them as victims of imagined Chinese-led information operations, aided and abetted by an imagined network of communist fellow travellers in the west. The movie idea “has all the ingredients of a major hit”, they blagged.

The producer did not write back. No movie was made. The truth was that their campaign helped flame divisive and damaging rows, potentially hindering international Covid research.

The campaign was led by former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Sir Richard Dearlove in conjunction with retired history academic Gwythian (Gwyn) Prins, and lobbyist John Constable of the privately funded climate change denial group Global Warming Policy Foundation. The scientific member of the group, oncologist professor Gus Dalgleish, was a prominent member of UKIP who had stood as the party’s parliamentary candidate in a south London constituency then campaigned for “Leave Means Leave”. All were avid supporters of Brexit.

The early months of 2020 were a time of celebration for the gang. “We had a splendid party,” Prins wrote to Dearlove the night after Brexit day, 31 January 2020, signing off: “Brexit Baby ready to rock.”

Two months later, as infection overcame the world, the five Brexiteers and a Norwegian scientist became convinced that the deadly and newly discovered SARS-CoV-2 virus (Covid-19) had been human-made in China. They came up with a scheme to make money from promoting a vaccine idea from Dalgleish and Norwegian colleague Birger Sørensen. Sørensen ran a small Oslo pharma company, Immunor AS. Immunor had previously claimed to have found “functional cures” for HIV, the cause of Aids. Sørensen and Dalgleish – and later Prins – described holding stock or stock options in Immunor.

The group began lobbying Britain’s prime minister early in the pandemic. A cache of thousands of leaked personal emails reveals how the group hoped they and their contacts could cash in by getting the British government to commit to buy millions of doses of the untested Norwegian-made “Sørensen Vaccine” – and how Nature got in the way.

17 March 2020. As the UK faced rising Covid deaths and hospitalisations, and prime minister Boris Johnson refused to act, Dalgleish prepared an Urgent Briefing for the Prime Minister and his Advisers on vaccine development. Backed by Dearlove, Dalgleish claimed that the virus “is very probably the result of laboratory intervention”. DNA evidence, he claimed, was consistent with the virus being a laboratory “escapee”.

The alleged man-made origin of SARS-CoV-2 had “important implications for vaccine design”, Johnson was told. This meant, in the confident minds of the Covid Hunters, that only the Sørensen Vaccine – later called BioVacc-19 – was likely to work and save the world.

“A vaccine based on these findings is currently in production for pre-clinical testing, expected to start in April 2020,” Dalgleish claimed – meaning that “UK funding for rapid trials and changes to normal trials protocols are now required”.

As Dalgleish finalised the pitch for government funds, the group was confounded when Nature Medicine, the peer-reviewed monthly clinical medical subsidiary of Springer Nature, published a scientific report on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, showing that it was “not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus”.

The group were, according to the private email exchanges examined by Computer Weekly and Byline Times, infuriated by this science-based finding. Science provided clear evidence that their idea was wrong – so undermining their vaccine idea. To the Hunters, this was clear evidence of a Chinese-led conspiracy. The article triggered their campaign against Nature. The author of the report, Prins later claimed, was an “arrogant young pup”.

Fearing they could be pipped at the post, impacting hopes for vaccine funding, Hunter group member John Constable began digging for dirt. At the last minute, Constable’s “swift and effective primary research” was added to a new note sent to Downing Street. Using the internet, Constable quickly found out that Nature had once visited and written about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and also that staff had visited Beijing and sent birthday greetings to the Chinese Academy of Sciences on its 70th anniversary. These points were added to the warning note to the prime minister.

Constable later dug into individuals’ hobbies, social media posts, Chinese contacts, lovers, career history and parentage, concluding in one instance that a person’s “tone of voice” when talking about Chinese research showed them to be a “committed Sinophile”.

The writers, Dalgleish and Prins, omitted to state that they held or were offered stock in Immunor. Dalgleish was required to disclose stock options in Immunor in a scientific paper. Emails from Prins disclose that Sørensen offered him stock in Immunor “as recognition for my involvement in the project”. Dalgleish offered to hold these for Prins as a nominee. “Much cleaner please to transfer the stock in my name directly to me please,” Prins wrote back. “I have no ethical problem.”

He added: “We need to do this before the stock value rockets as it will!”

Lockdown

23 March 2020. The UK was ordered into lockdown. The Hunters’ campaign was “co-ordinated remotely by Gwythian from his bucolic summerhouse deep in the English countryside, with encrypted voice and video conferences and messages flashing around the world day and night”, according to the failed Hollywood movie pitch he wrote later.

Prins and Dearlove doubled down on their attack on the science and science journals they disliked. They completed and delivered a pompous 15-page dossier to Cabinet minister and number two to the prime minister, Michael Gove. A large, red diagonal overprint across each page aped the style of genuine government classified secret information with the warning “SECRET – RECIPIENT’S EYES ONLY”.

Titled Urgent Briefing for the Prime Minister and his Advisers, the dossier claimed to identify Chinese “agents of influence”. They meant Nature and its staff.

“It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV),” Dearlove and Prins claimed. China was undertaking an “information and influence operation” to trick the world into believing “the natural causation narrative – and, by misdirection, to conceal true origin and responsibility”. There was, they alleged, “circumstantial evidence” that scientific journals were pursuing the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) narrative.

27 March 2020. Prins wrote to thank the team for “support in the mission”, adding: “Michael Gove called me last night to apologise for the fact that Gus had not yet been contacted on the offer … and that Birger [Sørensen] was yet to receive a call about the Immunor vaccine. He promised that both these things would happen very soon.”

Prins also informed fellow Hunters that Gove had “received the briefing last night … I am leaving him to digest it over the weekend. I have advised that he should restrict circulation to himself, the Prime Minister and [advisor] Dom Cummings.”

31 March 2020. Prins again emailed his group, saying: “I am speaking to Michael [Gove] at 1030 and will ask for the warrant and taps a.s.a.p. Once in place, Gus [Dalgleish] will deliver [an imagined bait they thought would reveal that the Chinese were secretly in control of Nature].” 

Prins was asking, in effect, for MI5 surveillance to be started against Nature Medicine and Nature. Prins had also warned of an imagined “China Persons of Influence Network” of senior officials, politicians and academics allegedly under the influence of the communist state. Prins and Dearlove were particularly concerned about praise for Chinese scientific research coming from the UK: “The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] has long pursued a strategy of identifying ‘agents of influence’…who, wittingly or otherwise, can be exploited to advance the interests of the PRC.”  

Prins meant not only Nature, he explained, but also the Royal Society (of Science) and Imperial College, and the London School of Economics. He wanted them all targeted as nodes of “climate catastrophism”.

Prins and Gove spoke again on 31 March 2020.

Prins’s request for surveillance was “advice which I understand he [Gove] is taking very seriously”, according to an email Dearlove sent after Prins and Gove’s planned discussion. Dearlove mailed a former senior Foreign Office official and intelligence contact asking that MI6 – whom he called “the powers that be” – should have the group “on warrant”. This meant that he wanted electronic surveillance to be used to reveal how Chinese agents were allegedly running their target, Nature.

The former Foreign Office official appears never to have replied to Dearlove’s email. The official, who Computer Weekly is not naming, did not reply to our enquiries.