Jessica Hockett, PhD

Matt Ridley and Anton van der Merwe have declined my request to publish their respective email responses to my open letter to Dr. Ridley.

Open Letter to Matt Ridley [UPDATED 9 July 2026]

I posted the letter on 2 July 2026 and, after learning that Dr. Ridley has a website with a contact form, sent him a message there. He replied via email and said the link I provided didn’t work, so I sent the letter as a PDF.

Shortly after he responded to some of the contents in the letter, I received an email from Anton van der Merwe, his colleague on “The preponderance of evidence suggests that the Covid-19 pandemic began as a result of a research accident”. I co-authored a reaction to that paper published on 30 June 2025, which Dr. Ridley and Prof van der Merwe never responded to or (as far as I know) publicly or privately acknowledged as having seen or read.

Both men misrepresented my positions, and both falsely attributed to me a belief that the scientific world and thousands of scientists have conspired or are keeping a secret.

In addition, Dr. Ridley’s response focused on putative characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 and notably did not mention the attribute of novelty. Prof van der Merwe expressed concerns about pandemics being a serious risk to humanity, including his conviction that risks have intensified because (so he believes) dangerous pathogens have become easy to make in laboratories.*

I am sharing my response to Dr. Ridley and Prof van der Merwe below, as matters of personal interest, advancing public discourse, and documenting another example of what I view as resistance to moving beyond the parameters of the myriad false binaries that have marked debates about the COVID-19 event.

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9 July 2026

Dear Dr. Ridley and Prof. van der Merwe,

Thank you both for replying.

Your responses help clarify the problem I am trying to identify. Neither of you answered the question I asked. Instead, you answered as though I had denied that materials labeled SARS-CoV-2 have been sequenced, imaged, cultured, passaged, modeled, or incorporated into diagnostic and research systems. 

My question was not whether something was identified, named, sequenced, photographed, cultured, analyzed, or detected. My question was whether those materials establish that a novel SARS-like virus caused a new disease, spread from human to human or through the air, and produced the events now called “the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Evidence of sequences, electron micrographs, cultures, protein structures, PCR results, or symptom lists does not, by itself, establish causality, mechanism, timing, clinical distinctiveness, transmission dynamics, or population-level impact. Nor does it explain the sudden, highly unusual mortality-event curves in places such as New York City and Bergamo; the attribution practices used to label deaths as COVID; the role of hospital, nursing-home, and emergency medical service protocols; the effects of medical-management measures taken; or the transformation of ordinary respiratory and all-cause mortality data into a global pandemic story.

I am not arguing that “the entire scientific world” knowingly conspired to fabricate evidence, or that every doctor, scientist, health official, journalist, or member of the public was “in on” anything. That is a familiar but unhelpful straw man argument response.

The underlying issue is simpler and more serious because evidence does not present itself as such. Rather, it is selected and judged. What constitutes evidence relative to the foundational question, and what does that evidence actually establish, versus what was inferred, assumed, modeled, labeled, coded, promoted, or imposed by policy?

My working view is that the spring 2020 events called “the COVID-19 pandemic” are better explained by a combination of testing and diagnostic regimes, changes to death-certificate practices, emergency declarations, iatrogenic directives, treatment/non-treatment decisions, fear-driven propaganda, financial and institutional incentives, mainstream and alternative media amplification, and statistical manipulation than by the sudden global emergence and spread of a novel SARS-like pathogen causing a clinically-distinct new disease.

That view may be wrong. If it is, those defending the standard narrative, or modified versions of it, should be able to say where and how it is wrong.

Your replies do not do that. They are additional examples of the evasive maneuvers I have encountered for several years, i.e., appeals to consensus, incredulity, and comparisons to flat earth, anti-evolutionism, and HIV/AIDS denial. Such comparisons may signal disapproval, but they do not answer the evidentiary questions I am posing.

Your work begins with the assumption the entity called SARS-CoV-2 caused a pandemic. But the origin of a virus, or of a sequence associated therewith, is not the same as the origin of a disease event, much less the origin of a global political, medical, statistical, and social phenomenon.

Before asking (or at least in addition to asking) whether SARS-CoV-2 came from a market, cave, database, laboratory, or research program, one must first establish what SARS-CoV-2 did in the real world.

• Did it cause a new disease?
• Did that disease have a clinically distinct presentation?
• Did it spread through populations in the manner claimed?
• Did it cause the mass-casualty events attributed to it?
• Did it produce the timing and geographical patterns observed in mortality data?

These are not “silly” or “delusional” questions. They are critical to the study of what occurred in reality and what was presented to us as being necessarily true. 

Should you wish to engage the actual question, or to address the specific questions posed in [30 June 2025] The Conservative Woman piece or [2 July 2026] the open letter I sent and posted, I welcome the engagement. A credible response would address causality, transmission, timing, mortality, and attribution, not merely the existence of laboratory and diagnostic materials labeled SARS-CoV-2.

In closing, I have several specific information requests:

1. Can you confirm whether you read any or all of the articles I linked and footnoted in my letter?
2. On page 13 of the paper that you posted to ResearchGate last year, you wrote, “When the pandemic began in January 2020, Shi Zhengli of the WIV published two articles…” What event or action are you referring to with “the pandemic began in January 2020”? The World Health Organization declared a PHEIC on 30 January 2020, but the pandemic declaration came on 11 March 2020. Is this a reference to the uploading of sequences earlier in January, or to something else?
3. Do you have any objection to my publishing our correspondence?

Thank you again for taking the time to read and respond.  Please confirm receipt of this email.

Sincerely,

Jessica Hockett, PhD

www.woodhouse76.com

(A copy of this response is attached as a PDF.)

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*paraphrased/summarized

** This view is also expressed by the Trump administration and Brownstone Institute’s Jeffrey Tucker, who said in a recent essay, “With so many biolabs around the world working on infectious disease, not only examining viruses but also creating them along with the countermeasures, we are certain to face a leak in the future, likely one more terrifying than the last.”

Dissident Debates & Views

Update 13 July 2026: American paralegal and writer Katherine Watt of Bailiwick News has reacted to my interactions with Matt Ridley and Anton van der Merwe and provided an accurate and cogent distillation of the arc and main points.

On Causation-Attribution, Transmission and the Origins Question: Jessica Hockett’s latest challenges to official and permitted dissent narratives.