London, United Kingdom:

UK families of some 240,000 people who died from Covid-19 have hung festive lights on a London wall, a symbol of love, anger and pain ahead of another Christmas overshadowed by loss.

As the fifth anniversary of the global pandemic approaches, emotions still run raw across the UK amid lingering accusations that the then government responded too slowly to the crisis.

Some 240,000 hearts have been painted by hand on the wall, nestled on the banks of the Thames, opposite the British parliament.

Each heart on the 500-metre-long (540-yard) wall represents one of the UK victims of the disease, which shattered and disrupted lives around the globe after being first detected in China in December 2019.

“We put up lights every Christmas, just as a way to reflect and remember those people who are not with us,” said Kirsten Hackman, 58, whose mother died from Covid in May 2020.

“For many of us, there is that empty place at the table this Christmas,” she added.

The wall is a collective “therapy session,” say volunteers.

Since 2019 more than seven million people have been reported to have died from Covid worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. But the true toll is believed to be much higher.

Thousands of messages written on the hearts on the London wall reveal the depth of the emotional toll and scars left by the pandemic on UK lives.

“Mamy, love you forever,” reads one, while another says: “Phil, always in my heart”.

The remembrance wall was originally meant to be temporary, and was constructed without permission in March 2021 in protest at then prime minister Boris Johnson’s handling of the pandemic.

He faced accusations of being too slow to recognise Covid’s threat and then taking too long to lock down the country to try to prevent the spread of the highly infectious disease.

The wall is an “outpouring of love, anger, rage”, Lorelei King, whose husband died of Covid in March 2020, told AFP.

The 71-year-old is part of the “Friends of the Wall” group, a dozen volunteers who come every Friday to clean the monument, repaint the rain-washed hearts and rewrite the messages.

“It’s quite meditative”, she said.

The group continues to draw new hearts as Covid claims new lives.

Wall ‘comforts me’

But on the Friday before Christmas, the volunteers met for another, more joyful mission: to hang lights along the wall.

They illuminated them on Monday, and the decorations will remain in place until the beginning of January.

Nearly five years after the start of the pandemic, the pain remains the same, said King, adding she was one of many who had not been able to grieve properly.

“We weren’t able to have a real funeral,” due to lockdown rules, she explained, referring to the severe restrictions put in place on visiting loved ones in their dying hours, and then from holding large gatherings to mourn their loss.

Instead, she focuses her energy on the wall. “It comforts me. And I don’t want the people we care about to be forgotten,” said King.

“We are all in the same boat”, added Michelle Rumball, 53, whose mother died of Covid in April 2020.

She was there on the first day that some hearts were painted, following a social media call by activist group Led By Donkeys.

Over the next 10 days, hundreds of people who had lost loved ones showed up to add their tribute, despite risking arrest for damaging a listed wall.

“I was very angry at that time. It was a demonstration,” recalled Rumball.

The group is in discussions with the authorities to make the wall, whose upkeep depends on donations, “permanent” and officially recognised, meaning it could be better protected.

And a few days before Christmas, they had a “very positive” meeting, King said.

According to the WHO, more than 232,000 people have died with Covid in the United Kingdom. By comparison, there have been around 168,000 deaths in France.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

File photo of Brad Wenstrup, House Select Coronavirus Pandemic Subcommittee Chairman during a hearing with experts from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on November 14, 2024 in Washington, DC.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images via AFP/Chip Somodevilla

The story so far: A U.S. Congressional committee led by Republican Brad Wenstrup has concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic was the result of the spread of a virus that likely leaked from a research facility in Wuhan, China.

The final report of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, established in February 2023, was published on December 2, 2024. The report runs over 500 pages and, according to committee members, will serve as a roadmap for government action during future pandemics.

“A future pandemic requires a whole-of-America response managed by those without personal benefit or bias,” Mr. Wenstrup wrote. “We can always do better, and for the sake of future generations of Americans, we must.”

The lab-leak theory

The report’s highlight is that SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, possibly emerged from a laboratory leak. The report finds this conclusion on inferred or circumstantial claims made early during the pandemic.

For example, it quotes an unclassified factsheet from January 2021 published by the U.S. State Department that said: “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.” The report itself does not directly prove the lab-leak theory, however.

The report also quotes previous statements by Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, in June 2024 in support of the lab-leak theory. In one of these statements, Dr. Chan says the virus emerged in Wuhan, which is also home to China’s “foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses”, and that Shi Zhengli, a senior virologist at WIV, “has been researching SARS-like viruses for over a decade and even initially wondered if the outbreak came from the WIV”.

But at a conference called ‘Preparing for the Next Pandemic: Evolution, Pathogenesis and Virology of Coronaviruses’ in Japan on December 4, Dr. Shi reportedly refuted the claim that the viruses she was studying were ancestors of the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen. She had earlier promised to sequence the genomes of 56 betacoronaviruses she and her team had collected between 2004 and 2021 and were studying. She presented the sequencing data and its analyses at the conference. (The latter have yet to be peer-reviewed.)

The Select Subcommittee report also noted an observation by Nicholas Wade, former science editor at The New York Times, in January 2024, that SARS-CoV-2 “possesses a furin cleavage site, found in none of the other 871 known members of its viral family, so it cannot have gained such a site through the ordinary evolutionary swaps of genetic material within a family.”

A furin cleavage is the process by which the furin enzyme breaks up specific proteins to activate them. The furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 controls how it interacts with human cells to cause the disease. A letter published in The Lancet in August 2023 by researchers from Cornell University refuted Mr. Wade’s idea and said the site could have evolved naturally, as opposed to being genetically engineered.

What else does the report say?

The report also said the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded gain-of-function research at WIV. Gain-of-function research refers to studies where researchers genetically alter organisms to give them additional functions, like enhanced transmissibility or infectivity.

At one of the hearings of the Select Subcommittee, Lawrence Tabak, who served as the acting director of NIH from December 20, 2021, to November 8, 2023, agreed the NIH funded “gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through EcoHealth”.

EcoHealth Alliance is a U.S.-based NGO that had received federal funding and later came under fire for its work with the WIV to study wild animal viruses. The U.S. government suspended the group’s federal funding in May 2024 as the lab-leak theory gained in popularity.

Mr. Wenstrup’s report also criticised EcoHealth for delaying the submission of its fifth annual progress report from September 2019 to August 2021. (Organisations that receive government funds are required to provide annual reports on the status of their research to the funding agency.) The Select Subcommittee report has claimed EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak obstructed a congressional investigation into the matter.

The report also blamed the World Health Organisation for pandering to the Chinese Communist Party and concealing important information related to the virus when the cases were being reported.

Economic losses

The Select Subcommittee also delved into COVID-19 relief funding, alleging “significant lapses” in allocation. The Paycheck Protection Programme was created in March 2020 to help small businesses, individuals, and nonprofit organisations by providing them relief loans. According to the report, the programme received multiple fraudulent claims that resulted in the loss of at least $64 billion.

Another area where the U.S. reportedly suffered heavy losses was the fraudulent unemployment insurance payments, which were valued at more than $191 billion by the Select Subcommittee.

The report alleged the lockdowns during the epidemic spread of COVID-19 in the country were “unscientific”. However, it also praised travel restrictions imposed by Republican leader Donald Trump, who was the U.S. President until January 2021 before Joe Biden took over. It said the restrictions weren’t “xenophobic”, as his detractors, including Mr. Biden, had alleged.

The Select Subcommittee report also said vaccine passports — the practice of allowing people to access most public areas like restaurants and sports stadiums only if they had been vaccinated — lacked “scientific basis” and blamed Biden administration and public health officials for exaggerating the “power of COVID-19 vaccines”.