New crown virus from Wuhan lab leak? Many experts once dismissed this hypothesis, with some simply classifying it as a conspiracy theory. Now, however, it is making waves again in the United States. The EU-US has called for an independent and transparent investigation into the traceability of the new coronavirus.
Scott Gottlieb, former director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), put it this way: “The number of people who support the origin of the new coronavirus from animals remains intact, but the number of experts who believe that this virus may have come from the laboratory continues to grow.” “A year ago, it was considered most consistent with common sense to support that the virus arose by natural evolution, that is, was transmitted from an animal, because this scenario was the most likely; the problem is that who that animal was has not been discovered to date.”
Perhaps the most striking change came from Biden’s health advisor, Fauci, a leading American epidemiologist, who in a recent interview on the PolitiFact news site changed his position from a year ago when he dismissed “the hypothesis that the virus came from a laboratory” and replied when asked by a reporter whether the new coronavirus originated in natural evolution. “I’m not sure about that, and I think we should continue to investigate what’s happening in China until we find out what’s going on.” “I am very supportive of any investigation into the origin of the virus.” The Hill described Fauci’s statement as dropping a bombshell on May 24.
Until a few weeks ago, on March 26, Robert Redfield, the CDC director who left earlier that year, told CNN that he believed the new coronavirus was “leaked” from the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and began spreading in September-October 2019, Fauci countered that it was “unlikely” because most public health experts consider the virus to be naturally transmitted. Earlier, the respected expert also said that many highly qualified virologists have found that the new coronavirus is fully compatible with the feature that the virus mutates in animals before being transmitted to humans.
Fauci dropped such a bombshell that China’s official media, the Global Times, was furious, calling the U.S. scientists who have now changed their tune in support of the Wuhan lab investigation a group of “weak little people,” in an article published May 25 entitled “They, the scientists who betrayed China “.
The question is, who has betrayed whom?
Why the wind has changed
On Sunday, the U.S. ‘Wall Street Journal’ cited an undisclosed U.S. intelligence report that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences had fallen ill in November 2019 and were sick enough to be hospitalized with symptoms that could resemble the 2019 New Coronavirus as well as seasonal epidemics. The official Chinese confirmation of the Wuhan outbreak of the new coronavirus was in late December, so the timing of the illness and details of the medical treatment sought by the three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virus has once again raised questions about the Institute. However, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson dismissed the report as unfounded.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that six workers cleaning bat guano in a copper mine in Mojiang, Yunnan province, contracted a mysterious coronavirus-like pneumonia in 2012, and three of them died of the disease. A large number of bat specimens were later collected at the cave by Shi Zhengli’s team at the Wuhan Institute of Virus. In fact, the French newspaper Le Monde and the Associated Press both reported on the bat cave in February this year, and more dramatically, when the AP reporter was about to visit the cave, he was blocked by police disguised as villagers. Now, there is also a significant doubt as to what the causal relationship is between the illnesses suffered by these miners, the virus found in the cave and the research conducted by the WuXi Institute on the collected specimens and the 2019 outbreak of neo-crown virus, and why the Chinese side blocked access.
After the outbreak of New Crown in Wuhan, China, there were repeated calls from the international community to send experts to investigate, and the Chinese side refused to comply. Almost a year later, the Chinese side finally agreed to a joint investigation team of WHO and Chinese experts to investigate. Even in such a Chinese-led joint investigation mission, the foreign experts sent there came back saying that all they had seen was the material that the Chinese side was willing to provide and that the Wuhan Virus Institute had not provided them with the original records, let alone the full information material. So much so that WHO Director-General Tan Desai criticized the experts at a press conference for their inability to cooperate in the investigation.
After four weeks of investigation, the joint expert mission reported that a laboratory leak was “highly unlikely,” a conclusion that sparked an uproar. Several countries in the United States and Europe expressed “grave concern” that the Beijing authorities had not cooperated with the investigation and provided full information, so much so that the World Health Organization’s director-general, Tan Desai, who is seen as pro-Beijing, made it clear at a press conference that a new investigation must be launched into the hypothesis of a laboratory leak.
The investigation was quickly perceived internationally as a non-independent one, and for months there were calls from European and American scientists, and in mid-May, 15 more prominent scientists in the American journal Science called for a real investigation into the source of the new coronavirus. Experts believe that both claims are important, whether they are transmitted by animals or by laboratory accidents, but so far, they have not been treated as equivalent.
At the 74th Annual Assembly of the World Health Organization on Monday, several European and American countries renewed their demand for a new traceability investigation into the new coronavirus.
Wuhan virus institute is full of doubts
In fact, the Chinese side’s inconsistent statements and attempts to cover up and block the independent investigation by all means are important factors that have aroused increasingly serious suspicions.
In the early days of the outbreak, Shi Zhengli also had doubts about whether it was a laboratory transmission. Shi Zhengli herself, who led the team collecting specimens at the Bat Cave in Yunnan back then, said in an interview with ‘Scientific American’ on April 27th last year that she rushed back to Wuhan immediately after receiving an emergency call from the leadership of the Wuhan Institute of Virus at the hotel where she was meeting in Shanghai at 7 pm on December 30, 2019. At that time, the virus tests of two suspected Sars patients had been sent to the Virus Institute. She wondered uneasily on the way: “Is the Hubei Health Bureau mistaken? Did the virus come from our laboratory”.
Shi Zhengli said she compared the virus samples with the thousands of coronavirus samples obtained from more than 15,000 bats in the laboratory for more than a decade, browsed the laboratory records of the past few years, and checked the experimental materials, especially in the waste disposal process, for any negligence. It was a “relief” to find that none of the patient samples matched the genetic sequences of the viruses their team sampled from the bat caves.
Of course, Shi Zhengli explained all this to rule out the possibility that the virus came from her lab. However, Shi at least suspected the possibility of a virus lab leak at first, speculating that if the new coronavirus occurred naturally, it would have appeared in places like Yunnan and Guangdong, Guangxi, where the bats roost, rather than in Wuhan. However, with so many bat virus specimens in her P4 lab, one cannot help but wonder. If there was nothing wrong with the WVL, why didn’t the experts who came to investigate provide the original records and details of the relevant research?
It is also questionable that after the SARS outbreak in China in 2003, the source of the infection, the civet, was found five months later, and why the 2019 New Coronavirus has remained untraceable from any animal to date?
The security management of the Wuhan Virus Institute has also been questioned, with the Washington Post in 2020 citing an internal US diplomatic cable revealing that US diplomats who had visited the Wuhan P4 laboratory returned to the State Department as early as 2018 that the Wuhan Virus Institute’s P4 laboratory “has inadequately trained personnel and poorly managed security hazards”. Similar reports have been made in the French media, and France, which helped build the Wuhan Virus Institute, has also raised questions about its security management.
The best way to resolve the doubts is to open up and cooperate with international investigations and provide as much original information as possible to find the source of the new coronavirus. The blockade and cover-up will only make the doubts grow.
For the international community, the urgent need to clarify the origin of the virus is not to find a criminal, but only when the source of the new coronavirus is clarified can we effectively prevent a new pandemic from occurring.
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