Bloomberg
A top Wuhan laboratory official has denied any role in spreading the new coronavirus, in the most high profile response from a facility at the center of months of speculation about how the previously unknown animal disease made the leap to humans.
Yuan Zhiming, director of the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, hit back at those promoting theories that the virus had escaped from the facility and caused the outbreak in the central Chinese city. “There is absolutely no way that the virus originated from our institute,†Yuan said in an interview with the state-run China Global Television Network (CGTN).
Yuan rejected theories that the yet-to-be identified “Patient Zero†for Covid-19 had contact with the institute, saying none of its employees, retirees or student researchers were known to be infected. He said US Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, and Washington Post journalists were among those “deliberately leading people†to mistrust the facility and its “P4†top-level-security pathogen lab.
US President Donald Trump again fanned speculation about the origins of the virus at a news conference, in which he said China should face consequences if it was “knowingly responsible†for the outbreak. The US president has at times referred to the disease as a “Chinese virus,†a term he said he embraced after a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman tweeted an unsubstantiated theory about US Army athletes introducing the pathogen to Wuhan.
“What we know is that the ground zero for this virus was within a few miles of that lab,†Peter Navarro, a Trump trade adviser, said on Fox News. “If you simply do an Occam’s razor approach that the simplest explanation is probably the most likely, I think it’s incumbent on China to prove that it wasn’t that lab.â€
The US-China blame game has helped fuel scrutiny of the Wuhan lab, which was studying bat-borne coronaviruses like the one that causes Covid-19. US diplomats sent back warnings about safety procedures in the lab after visits two years ago, the Washington Post reported in a commentary, citing diplomatic cables.
“They don’t have any evidence on this, what they rely on is only their guess,†Yuan told CGTN. “I hope such a conspiracy theory will not affect cooperation among scientists around the world.â€
Earlier Accidents
The P4 lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology began operations in January 2018 and was the first of its kind built in mainland China.
It was designed with help from France as part of a joint research initiative focused
on infectious diseases and equipped for the highest level of bio-containment, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
The first project undertaken at the lab was to research Xinjiang hemorrhagic fever, a tick-borne virus with a fatality rate of as much as 50% in humans, the report said.
The facility has been the center of multiple conspiracy theories, including one that’s circulated on Chinese social media since late January that the new coronavirus escaped from the lab.
Multiple posts have cited previous blunders by Chinese scientists as evidence that similar research projects haven’t been executed properly.