Five years ago today, based on a highly misleading ‘model’ forecast from one academic, Neil Ferguson, the British government ditched its pandemic plan and locked the entire country down. This decision had disastrous and – as Sweden proves – unnecessary consequences.

It was the first of many dreadful mistakes made by the government during the Covid pandemic: shutting schools at the behest of unions, assuming the virus was not airborne, vaccinating children, overclaiming for vaccines and masks. The government thought it knew best and it let us down.

But all those errors pale beside the biggest one of the lot, and the one that has done most to undermine trust in scientists – that is, the initial insistence that the virus did not originate in a laboratory accident. We now know that it almost certainly did. The evidence is overwhelming, as I have rehearsed many times. And it now includes a huge stack of documents – inadvertently made public and spotted by two open-source investigators, ‘Billy Bostickson’ and Gilles Demaneuf – that shows just how systematically we were deceived about this mother of all scandals.

Let me place you inside a taxi travelling to Geneva airport on 12 February 2020. Inside the cab are two people. One is Dr Peter Daszak, the $400,000-a-year head of the EcoHealth Alliance, an organisation that boasted about funnelling millions of dollars to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to harvest wild bat viruses and do risky experiments on them. He and his organisation would later be debarred from federal funding by the Biden administration for failing to divulge vital information about EcoHealth’s support for suspiciously risky gain-of-function experiments on close relatives of the virus that caused Covid.