The Wuhan Institute of Virology has been conducting research on bat coronaviruses since 2004. (File)
Beijing:
The Chinese institute of virology in the city where COVID-19 first appeared has three live strains of bat coronaviruses in place, but none correspond to the new worldwide spreading chaos, said its director.
Scientists believe COVID-19 – which first emerged in Wuhan and killed around 340,000 people worldwide – originated from bats and could have been transmitted to people via another mammal.
But the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology told public television CGTN that US President Donald Trump and others’ claims that the virus could have escaped from the facility were “sheer” manufacturing”.
In the interview filmed on May 13 but broadcast on Saturday evening, Wang Yanyi said that the center had “isolated and obtained bat coronaviruses”.
“We now have three strains of live virus … But their greatest similarity to SARS-CoV-2 is only 79.8%,” she said, referring to the coronavirus strain that causes COVID-19.
One of their research teams, led by Professor Shi Zhengli, has been studying bat coronaviruses since 2004 and is focusing on “tracing the sources of SARS”, the strain behind another virus epidemic nearly two years ago. decades.
“We know that the entire genome of SARS-CoV-2 is only 80% similar to that of SARS. This is an obvious difference,” she said.
“So in Professor Shi’s previous research, they did not pay attention to such viruses which are less similar to the SARS virus.”
Conspiracy rumors that the biosafety lab was involved in the epidemic swirled online for months before Trump and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo mainstream the theory claiming that there is evidence that the pathogen came from the institute.
The laboratory said it received samples of the then unknown virus on December 30, determined the viral genome sequence on January 2, and submitted information about the pathogen to WHO on January 11.
Wang said in the interview that before receiving samples in December, their team never “encountered, searched for, or kept the virus.”
“In fact, like everyone else, we didn’t even know the virus existed,” she said. “How could he have escaped from our laboratory when we never had it?”
The World Health Organization said that Washington had presented no evidence to support the “speculative” claims.
In an interview with Scientific American, Shi said that the genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 does not match any of the bat coronaviruses that his lab had previously collected and studied.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
