Chinese scientists ‘mapped’ coronavirus two weeks before outbreak in 2019

New bombshell claims suggest Chinese researchers mapped the virus in late 2019, raising further questions about the origins of Covid-19.

Chinese researchers mapped the virus that caused Covid-19 in late 2019 weeks before Beijing shared details of it to the world, bombshell new claims suggest.

Chinese officials at that time were still publicly describing the disease outbreak in Wuhan, China, as a viral pneumonia “of unknown cause” and had yet to close the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

But data leaked to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) show that a Chinese researcher in Beijing uploaded a nearly complete sequence of the virus’s structure to a US government-run database on December 28, 2019.

The deadly virus has killed more than 6.8 million people around the world, including 1.1 million in the US and 20,000 in Australia. Picture NCA NewsWire David Clark

The new information suggests China was not honest about what was known about the virus in the early days of the pandemic.

The extra few weeks could have proved crucial in helping the international medical community pinpoint how Covid-19 spread, develop medical defences and get started on an eventual vaccine.

The Chinese researcher who submitted the virus sequence, according to the WSJ, was Lili Ren of the Beijing-based Institute of Pathogen Biology. She didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

The startling claims compound mounting evidencethe virus that causes Covid-19 most likely leaked from a Chinese laboratory.

The deadly virus has killed more than 6.8 million people around the world, including 1.1 million in the US and more than 19,000 in Australia..

A FBI finding that the virus leaked from a lab was made with “moderate confidence” while a similar assertion by the United States Department of Energy was made with “low confidence”.

Both agencies reportedly arrived at their conclusions for different reasons.

“There is a variety of views in the intelligence community,” said White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, adding that the origins of Covid-19 remained under investigation as instructed by US President Joe Biden.

A new reports suggests that China was not honest about what it knew about the Covid-19 virus. Picture: AFP

“Here’s what I can tell you: President Biden has directed, repeatedly, every element of our intelligence community to put effort and resources behind getting to the bottom of this question,” Mr Sullivan told CNN’s State Of The Union.

“And if we gain any further insight or information, we will share it with Congress, and we will share it with the American people. But right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question.”

New concerns around Chinese scientists

Now are new concerns that Chinese scientists are experimenting with a virus related to Covid-19 which has a 100 per cent kill rate in “humanised” mice.

The deadly SARS-CoV-2-related pangolin coronavirus — known as GX_P2V — attacked the brains of mice that were engineered to reflect similar genetic makeup to people, according to a study shared by Beijing last week.

“This underscores a spillover risk of GX_P2V into humans and provides a unique model for understanding the pathogenic mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2-related viruses,” the authors wrote.

The deadly virus is a mutated version of GX/2017, a coronavirus cousin that was reportedly discovered in Malaysian pangolins in 2017 — three years before the pandemic, the New York Post reports.

All the mice that were infected with the virus died within just eight days, which researchers noted was a “surprisingly” rapid death rate.

GX_P2V had infected the lungs, bones, eyes, tracheas and brains of the dead mice, the last of which was severe enough to ultimately cause the death of the animals.

In the days before their deaths, the mice had quickly lost weight, exhibited a hunched posture and moved extremely sluggishly.

Most eerie of all, their eyes turned completely white the day before they died.

Although terrifying, the study is the first of its kind to report a 100% mortality rate in mice infected by the Covid-19 related virus — far surpassing previously reported results from another study, the researchers wrote.

Originally published as Chinese scientists ‘mapped’ coronavirus two weeks before outbreak in 2019