The Prime Minister’s award for science was bestowed last week on Professor Edward Holmes of Sydney University for his ‘transformative role in the scientific response to Covid-19’. That’s a diplomatic description. In March 2020, Holmes co-authored, with four other scientists, a highly influential article which claimed that it was ‘improbable’ that Sars-CoV-2, the virus that sparked the pandemic, ‘emerged through laboratory manipulation’ or that ‘any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible’.