Coronavirus: Wuhan lab theory ‘pure fabrication’, says Chinese scientist

Chinese scientists say both potential sources have failed to show links with the source of the pandemic.

A worker inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, the capital of China's Hubei province. Picture: AFP

Chinese scientists in recent days said they had ruled out both a laboratory and an animal market in the city of Wuhan as possible origins of the coronavirus pandemic, in their most detailed pushback to date against allegations from US officials and others over what might have sparked it.

The director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, at the centre of allegations around a potential laboratory accident, Wang Yanyi, over the weekend told China Central Television that the coronavirus was significantly different from any live pathogen that has been studied at the institute and that there therefore was no chance it could have leaked from there.

Separately, China’s top epidemiologist said Tuesday that testing of samples from a Wuhan food market, initially suspected as a path for the virus’s spread to humans, failed to show links between animals being sold there and the pathogen. Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in comments carried in Chinese state media, “It now turns out that the market is one of the victims.”

The comments, aimed at countering what Beijing perceives as efforts from top US officials to focus solely on China, are unlikely to pacify critics. The Chinese officials didn’t address fundamental issues, such as widespread evidence that China initially covered up the extent of the outbreak. In their calls for more global scientific collaboration to track the source of the virus, they also stopped short of endorsing widespread scientific belief that the coronavirus originated in China.

The question of the origin of the coronavirus has emerged as a major source of friction between China and the US since the killer pathogen was discovered in Wuhan late last year. More than 5.5 million people have been infected worldwide, deaths from the disease are approaching 350,000 and economies everywhere are suffering.

Nearly two thirds of Americans are critical of China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to data published Tuesday by Washington-based Pew Research Center based on a survey late last month and early in May. Pew said 84 per cent of Americans said they distrust information from China’s government about the outbreak, with 49 per cent indicating zero trust in that information.

US officials allege Beijing hasn’t displayed the transparency that might have helped contain the virus’s spread, and President Trump has withheld funding for the World Health Organisation in part because it “failed to publicly call on China to allow for an independent investigation into the origins of the virus.” China’s government says its response saved lives and prepared policy makers and scientists elsewhere to get ahead of the health emergency.

“The difference between China and some US politicians is as wide as that between facts and lies, between science and prejudice,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said at a briefing Sunday in Beijing.

The market had drawn scrutiny since it was a regional hub for China’s poorly regulated live animal trade, a known source for disease. And the lab’s longtime work to develop vaccines and other responses to dangerous pathogens has driven speculation of a possible leak.

Research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has included procedures some scientists consider risky, such as experiments where a virus is manipulated as part of testing possible vaccines.

The comments from the Chinese scientists together target theories that originated in alternative media before being trumpeted by US politicians that a problem at the lab could have leaked the virus into the city, and that its proximity to the market could have played a role in the spread.

“This is pure fabrication,” Dr Wang said in the broadcast interview.

China critics have pointed to a variety of questions about the early days of the outbreak when Beijing resisted international efforts to probe its origins, leaving them to make assumptions about how the city’s lab and nearby market might have played roles. “It’s circumstantial evidence, but that’s often the best we have when it comes with intelligence,” Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, told The Wall Street Journal on Friday.

President Xi Jinping last week signalled an intention to turn the crisis into an opportunity to shape global governance of health matters by pledging in a speech to the WHO an additional $2 billion in funding to combat the coronavirus and calling on other world leaders to support an investigation into not only where the virus came from but how it spread internationally. According to Johns Hopkins University’s tracker, 13 countries have now reported more cases than China, led by the US.

On December 1, 2019, a patient in Wuhan, China, started showing symptoms of what doctors determined was a new coronavirus. Since then, the virus has spread across the world. Here’s how the virus grew to a global pandemic.

Scientists generally believe the coronavirus originated in the animal world, likely in bats, then jumped to a so far unknown intermediate host animal before infecting humans, a point reiterated by the Chinese scientists.

Research by the Wuhan institute’s bat coronavirus expert, Shi Zhengli, has included procedures some scientists consider risky, such as experiments where a virus is manipulated as part of testing possible vaccines.

While the lab has said all along that the virus causing COVID-19 wasn’t in its catalogue of pathogens, Dr Wang’s comments in this weekend’s interview are notable for stating that none of the three strains of live virus handled by the institute are genetically close to the coronavirus at the heart of the pandemic. Further, she said that Dr Shi had no actual live sample of a coronavirus she discovered in 2013 in a bat, which her team this year found to be a 96 per cent match to the pathogen behind today’s pandemic.

Dr Wang said in this weekend’s broadcast interview that the institute had neither isolated nor obtained the live virus discovered in 2013, RaTG-13, because it was genetically too distant from the kinds of viruses studied by Dr. Shi, indicating the finding was based on a database that contained its genome sequence. “Thus there was no possibility of leaking RaTG-13,” she said.

Wall Street Journal