Shi Zhengli, a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has been at the center of the storm since the outbreak of the Chinese Communist virus. Unconfirmed speculation suggests that the CCP virus was leaked from her lab in Wuhan. In a recent interview with the BBC, Shi said she would be willing to give “any kind of interview” to rule out this possibility. Her surprising statement comes as a World health Organization (WHO) team prepares to travel to Wuhan next month to begin an investigation into the origins of the Chinese Communist virus.
The town of Tongguan is located deep in the mountains of southwestern China’s Yunnan province, making it difficult to reach even at the best of times. But when the BBC team recently tried to visit it, the last possibility had vanished.
Plainclothes police and other officers in unmarked cars followed us for miles on the narrow, rugged roads. When we stopped, they stopped too; when we were forced to turn around, they turned back after us.
We found a number of obstacles on the road, including a “broken down” truck. Locals confirmed that the truck had been placed on the road a few minutes before we arrived.
We also encountered unidentified people at the checkpoint who told us that it was their job to keep us out.
At first glance, it might seem unnecessary for us to make such an effort, trekking through the mountains just to see an unassuming abandoned copper mine. But back in 2012, six copper miners contracted a mysterious disease that eventually claimed the lives of three of them.
Their tragedy would have been largely forgotten, but the outbreak of the Communist Party’s viral epidemic has given it new meaning.
The deaths of these three men are now at the center of a major scientific debate about the origin of the virus and whether it came from nature or a laboratory.
That the Chinese Communist authorities are trying to prevent us from getting here suggests that they are struggling to control this narrative.
For more than a decade, these rolling, jungle-dense hills and the cave systems within them have been the focus of a major scientific field study.
Shi Zhengli’s P4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research (file photo)
It is led by Professor Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research.
In 2003, SARS, or SARS, claimed the lives of more than 700 people. The discovery that the disease-causing virus may have originated from a bat in a Yunnan cave earned Professor Shi Zhengli international acclaim.
Since then, Professor Shi, often referred to as the “Batwoman,” has been at the forefront of such research, trying to predict and prevent similar outbreaks from coming back.
Her team has identified hundreds of new bat coronaviruses by trapping bats, collecting samples of their droppings, and bringing them back to their lab in Wuhan, 1,600 kilometers away.
However, the fact that Wuhan has the world’s leading coronavirus research center and was also the first city to have a pandemic outbreak of the new coronavirus (CCP virus) has led some to suspect that the two events may be related.
The Chinese Communist government, the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research and Shi Zhengli have all angrily dismissed the allegations of laboratory leaks.
Since the outbreak, Professor Shi Zhengli has given few media interviews. Now, as scientists appointed by the World Health Organization are scheduled to visit Wuhan next January, she answered some questions from the BBC via email.
“I have communicated with the WHO experts twice,” she wrote when asked if she would invite them to the lab to investigate and thus put an end to outside questions. “I personally made it clear that they are welcome to visit the Wuhan Virus Institute,” she said.
When pressed by a BBC reporter on whether this would mean launching a formal investigation, such as having the experts look at lab data and records, Professor Shi Zhengli said, “I personally welcome any kind of visit, based on an open, transparent, trusting, reliable and reasonable way of dialogue. But the exact program should not be up to me.”
The BBC then received a call from the Wuhan Virus Institute’s publicity office, saying that Professor Shi Zhengli was speaking in her personal capacity and that her answers had not been approved by the institution.
The BBC declined a request to send this story to the publicity office for review in advance.
Datsyak (right) believes the lab leak theory is a “conspiracy theory” and “pure nonsense.
Many scientists believe that the most likely scenario is that Sars-Cov-2 (commonly known as “novel coronavirus” in Chinese), the virus that caused the new coronavirus, may have crossed the species barrier from bats to humans through an intermediate species.
Despite the olive branch offered by Professor Shi Zhengli, it seems unlikely that the WHO investigation will touch upon the laboratory leak theory.
The WHO’s terms of reference for this new crown traceability investigation do not include the hypothesis, and some members of the ten-member team have pretty much ruled out the possibility of this claim.
British zoologist Peter Daszak (Peter Daszak) was selected to be part of the investigation team. He had previously played a leading role in a multi-million dollar international project to sample wild viruses.
He had worked closely with Professor Zhengli Shi to conduct large-scale sampling of bats in China. Datsak has previously called the lab leak theory a “conspiracy theory” and “pure nonsense.
“I haven’t seen any evidence that there was a lab leak or that the lab had anything to do with the outbreak,” he said. “I’ve seen plenty of evidence that these are naturally occurring phenomena driven by human encroachment on wildlife habitat, which is clearly visible throughout Southeast Asia.”
When asked if he needed to seek access to the lab to completely rule out the lab leak theory, he said, “That’s not my job.”
“WHO negotiated the terms of reference and they asked us to follow the evidence, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
The Wuhan South China Seafood Market is thought to be closely linked to early cases of the outbreak.
In the early stages of the Wuhan outbreak, a number of cases were linked to the South China Seafood Market, which is known for its wildlife trade. While Communist authorities appear to have ruled out the market as a possible source, it will remain one of the focuses of the WHO investigation.
Dazak said the WHO team will “look at these clusters of cases, look at contacts, find out where the animals in the market are coming from and see where that takes us.”
The deaths of three workers at the Tong Guan copper mine after being in a cave full of bats sparked suspicions that they had contracted the bat coronavirus.
It was this “spillover effect” of animals passing the virus to humans that drove the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research to sample and test bats in Yunnan.
Thus, after the deaths, Wuhan Virus Institute scientists began sampling bats from the Tongguan cave in earnest. Not surprisingly, they visited and tested for 293 coronaviruses several times over the next three years.
But apart from a brief paper, little information has been published about the viruses they collected during these expeditions.
In January of this year, Professor Zhengli Shi became one of the first people to complete sequencing of the Sars-Cov-2 virus. At the time, the new virus was already rapidly ravaging the streets and neighborhoods of her city.
She took the long string of letters representing the unique genetic code of this virus and compared it to the large number of other viral strains that had been collected and stored over the years.
She then discovered that her database included one of the closest known relatives to Sars-Cov-2 – RaTG13.
RaTG13 is named after the abbreviation “Ra” for Rhinolophus affinis among the bats she extracted, the “TG” for the clearance of the mine site, and the “13” for the year of discovery, 2013.
Seven years after the discovery of RaTG13 in the mine, it has become one of the most controversial scientific issues of our time.
China has controlled the outbreak through strict quarantine measures.
Previously, there were many documented cases of laboratory leaks. For example, in 2004, there were two leaks of SARS virus from the China CDC’s Institute for the Prevention and Control of Viral Diseases in Beijing, despite the fact that the SARS outbreak had long been contained at that time.
The practice of genetic manipulation of viruses is also not new, and has been used to make viruses more infectious or lethal so that scientists can assess their threat and potentially develop treatments and vaccines.
And from the moment the Sars-Cov-2 virus was isolated and sequenced, scientists were stunned by its powerful ability to infect humans.
The notion that the new coronavirus (CCP virus) may have acquired these properties through manual manipulation in the laboratory was confronted head-on and seriously explored by a group of influential international scholars.
RaTG13 played a leading role in what has become a definitive paper ruling out the possibility of a laboratory leak.
The paper, published in Nature Medicine in March, claims that if a lab leak had occurred, Professor Zhengli Shi should have found a closer match than RaTG13 in her database.
Although RaTG13 is the closest known “relative” of the new coronavirus, with a 96.2% similarity, the two are still genetically far apart. It is unlikely that the former could have been artificially manipulated to become Sars-Cov-2.
The authors conclude that Sars-Cov-2 may have acquired its unique effects through the long-term, undetected transmission of a natural, milder precursor virus in humans or animals. The virus eventually evolved into the potent, deadly form first discovered in Wuhan in 2019.
However, some scientists are beginning to wonder where the hosts of these early natural infections are.
Daniel Lucey, MD, PhD, is an internist and professor of infectious diseases at Georgetown Medical Centre in Washington, DC. He has been in the field for a long time, from dealing with SARS in China to Ebola in Africa to Zika in Brazil.
He is confident that China has conducted a thorough search for clues to precursor viruses in human samples and animal populations stored in hospitals.
“They have the capacity, they have the resources, they have the drive, so of course they’ve done research in animals and in humans,” he said.
Finding the source of the outbreak is critical, he said. That’s not only for broader scientific understanding, but also to stop it from reappearing.
“We should search until we find it. I think we can find it, and there’s a good chance it’s already been found,” he told me. “But the question arises, why hasn’t it been disclosed?”
Dr. Lucy still believes that Sars-Cov-2 is most likely of natural origin, but he doesn’t want to rule out other options so easily.
“It’s been 12 or 13 months since the first confirmed case of Neocoronavirus (CCL) emerged, but we haven’t found an animal source,” he said. “So to me, that’s all the more reason to investigate other explanations.”
Is there a virus being studied in Chinese labs that is genetically closer to Sars-Cov-2, and if there ever was, would they inform the outside world? “Not all of the findings are published,” Lucy said.
I mentioned this idea to Peter Dazak, a member of the WHO mission to investigate the origins of the outbreak.
“You know, I’ve been working with the Wuhan Virus Institute for more than a decade,” he said. “I know some of the people there very well, and I go to their labs regularly. for 15 years I’ve been meeting and eating with them.”
“I’m working in China with my eyes wide open. And I was racking my brain looking back for the slightest hint of something out of the ordinary, but I never found it.”
When asked if his friendship and financial ties to Wuhan Virus would be a conflict of interest with his role in future investigations, he said, “The documents we submitted are available to everyone.”
He added that his collaboration with the Wuhan Virus Institute “makes me one of the most knowledgeable people in the world about the origin of these bat coronaviruses in China.”
China may have provided only limited data on the source of the outbreak, but has begun to promote its own theories.
State propaganda is building on some inconclusive research conducted by European scientists – suggesting that the new coronavirus (CCP virus) may have spread earlier than previously thought – thus implying that the virus did not originate in China.
But in the absence of sound data, this skepticism is only intensifying. Most of the skepticism has focused on RaTG13 and its origins in the Passage Mine. For example, some old academic papers have been found online, claiming that they appear to be at odds with the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research’s claims about sick miners. One of these papers was by a student at Kunming Medical University.
“I just downloaded and read the master’s thesis you mentioned from Kunming Medical University,” Shi Zhengli told the BBC.
“The statements don’t make sense, the conclusions are neither based nor logical, and it was actually used by conspiracy theorists to question me. In your place, what would you do?” She said.
Shi was also questioned about why the Wuhan Institute of Virus’ “bat- and mouse-derived virus pathogen database” was suddenly taken offline.
She told the BBC that it was due to an attack on the Wuhan Institute’s website, as well as on employees’ work and private email addresses, which “had to be shut down for security reasons.”
The Wuhan Institute of Virus Research, which is in the midst of the controversy, is located in a not-so-remote area in the eastern part of Wuhan.
“We do natural exploration, and the results are all published as papers in English-language journals,” she said. “The virus sequence information is also kept in the database of (the U.S.-run) GenBank, which is completely transparent, with nothing hidden.”
In rural Yunnan, it’s not just scientists who come with important questions, but also journalists.
After a decade of scientists experimenting with viruses collected from bats, we now know that the closest known ancestor to the new coronavirus (CCP virus) was discovered back in 2013. Today, the global pandemic of New Coronavirus (CCP virus) has claimed more than one million lives and devastated the global economy.
However, according to publicly available information, the Wuhan Institute of Virology has not done any research other than sequencing RaTG13 and entering it into a database.
Does this raise questions about the legitimacy of this costly, even what some consider risky, large-scale wild virus sampling project?
“You can certainly say we didn’t do enough,” Dazak told the BBC. “But it’s not fair to say we failed. We could have done much more on these virus studies than we have.”
Both Dazak and Zhengli Shi believe that pandemic prevention research is vital and urgent work.
“Our research is prospective and really difficult for lay people to understand; I have been working on bat coronaviruses for 15 years and know only a little bit about them and most of my knowledge is limited to understanding the genetic information,” Shi Zhengli wrote in an email.
Bats are mammals that can fly on wings like birds and are usually diurnal.
“We humans are small in the face of the myriad of microbes that exist in nature.”
The World Health Organization has pledged to investigate the origin of the virus with an “open mind. But the Chinese government doesn’t like questions and challenges, at least from journalists.
After leaving the pass, we tried to drive a few hours north to the cave where Professor Shi Zhengli conducted his groundbreaking research on SARS nearly a decade ago.
We were still being trailed by multiple unmarked cars and encountered another roadblock where we were told it was impassable.
A few hours later, we found local traffic diverted to a dirt road that bypassed the roadblock, but when we tried to follow the same route, we encountered another “broken down” car.
We were stuck in a field for over an hour and finally forced to go to the airport.
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