There is now a growing belief that the New Coronavirus was leaked from a laboratory.
In fact, many people suspected that the virus was a laboratory leak as early as the beginning of the New Guinea outbreak last year. Former CCTV host Cui Yongyuan took a poll on Twitter on February 28, and most respondents believed that “the virus was man-made and leaked through negligence.”
The reason why so many people suspected from the beginning that the virus was a laboratory leak is that since most experts agree that the host of the new coronavirus is bats in Yunnan, if the virus is naturally transmitted, the outbreak should have occurred in southern China, not in Wuhan, which is 1,000 to 2,000 kilometers away from the bats’ habitat in Yunnan. However, as we all know, the Wuhan Virus Institute has the largest number of bat virus samples in the world in its laboratory. Since the outbreak was in Wuhan, the virus most likely came from the laboratory.
Wuhan Virus Institute’s Shi Zhengli also said that when she first learned of the outbreak in Wuhan, she immediately worried if the virus was coming from her lab. In an interview with Scientific American on April 27 last year, Shi Zhengli said that she rushed back to Wuhan immediately after receiving an emergency call from the leadership of the Wuhan Institute of Virus at 7 p.m. on Dec. 30, 2019, at the hotel where she was meeting in Shanghai. At that time, the virus tests of two suspected Sars patients had been sent to the Virus Institute. She wondered uneasily the whole way, “Did the virus come from our lab?” Shi said she thought the high-risk areas for coronavirus would be Guangdong, Guangxi or Yunnan in southern China, “I never thought it would break out in Wuhan, a city in central China.”
However, Shi Zhengli said she quickly ruled out that suspicion. She compared the patient’s virus samples with thousands of coronavirus samples taken from more than 15,000 bats over more than a decade in the lab. In the end, it turned out that none of the patient’s samples matched the genetic sequence of the virus their team had sampled from the bat cave. This, she says, “put a stone in my heart.
But Shi Zhengli’s claim lacked conviction. As stated in the May 6, 2020, Wall Street Journal editorial article, “Wuhan Lab Theory,” Shi Zhengli herself insists that the coronavirus present in Wuhan does not match any of the samples, but that would require an outside investigation to confirm.
Besides, there are several biological laboratories in the Wuhan area. For example, the Wuhan CDC has a P2 laboratory for pathogenic biology testing, only 1 mile from the South China Seafood Market. The Wuhan CDC has a post-80s doctor named Tian Junhua. According to official media reports, Tian Junhua began his research on bats in 2012 and has gone out to capture bats many times, having captured more than 10,000 bats for samples. Once the operation was not protected, Tian Junhua was splashed with bat urine and feces and self-isolated for 14 days for fear of being infected with the virus.
The reason why, after a year, more and more people suspect laboratory leaks is that until today, experts have come up empty-handed in their search for the direct source of the virus, the intermediate host. Since human infections are increasingly unlikely to be transmitted by animals with intermediate hosts, that leaves only laboratory leaks as the only way.
Earlier, the Chinese official media claimed that the new crown pneumonia cases were all linked to the South China Seafood Market in Wuhan. However, this claim was quickly dismissed. Because in testing hundreds of samples collected from the seafood market, the virus was only found on some environmental samples, and none of the animal samples were found to have the virus. In addition, the official media has long reported that one-third of the early confirmed cases, including the first confirmed case, had never been to a seafood market. Gao Fu, director of the CDC, said clearly that at first we believed the virus originated from seafood markets, but now it appears that seafood markets were also a victim.
At a press conference on March 31 this year, Chinese expert Liang Wannian said: environmental samples from the Wuhan South China seafood market were generally contaminated with the new coronavirus, and large-scale tests of animal products were not found to be positive; no new coronavirus was found in bats in Hubei Province or in a large number of domestic poultry and wild animals sampled and monitored throughout China, and no evidence of circulation of the new coronavirus in domestic poultry and wild animals before or after the outbreak was found This means that no direct transmission was found. This means that no direct source of infection, i.e., an intermediate host, has been found.
Chinese experts have suggested that the virus may have been imported overseas through infected, contaminated frozen chain products. This argument is clearly untenable. If the virus had been imported overseas through the frozen chain, it would not have been a single point of outbreak in Wuhan, but rather in a city with more extensive overseas connections than Wuhan. Dr. Zhang Wenhong of Shanghai Huashan Hospital has long pointed out that the claim of external importation of the virus is not valid. Furthermore, if the virus was imported from overseas, why did it not break out first overseas?
In the 2003 Sars outbreak, it took experts only five months to find the direct source of infection, the civet. The fact that it has been a year and a half since the outbreak and no animal has been found as the direct source of infection only leads to the growing belief that the virus was not originally transmitted by animals, but rather leaked from a laboratory. This, coupled with the Chinese government’s refusal to allow foreign experts to investigate further, blocking information and destroying data, is tantamount to “no silver bullet here” and is a cover-up. Over the past few days, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post have published lengthy articles revealing a wealth of evidence. I would like to provide some additional clarifications.
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