Wuhan’s “batwoman” defended her laboratory for the origin of the Covid

The Chinese scientist Shi Zhengli, deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located at the center of theories According to which the covid-19 pandemic is due to a leak from his laboratory in the city of Wuhan, he denied that his institution was the cause of the global health catastrophe.

“How the hell am I going to offer proof of something that there is no proof of?” Dr Shi Zhengli told the newspaper. The New York Times. “I don’t know how the world got there, constantly dumping dirt on an innocent scientist,” he told the American newspaper.

Shi is an expert on bat coronaviruses, and some scientists have said she may have conducted so-called “gain-of-function” experiments in which scientists increase the strength of a virus to better study its effects on the hosts.

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According to the New York Times, in 2017, Shi and his colleagues at the Wuhan lab published a report on an experiment “in which they created novel hybrid bat coronaviruses by mixing and matching parts of several – including at least one that was almost transmissible to humans – to study its ability to infect and replicate in human cells. “

However, in an email accompanying the article, Shi said his experiences differed from Gain of Function experiences because they were not intended to create a more dangerous virus. Instead, they were trying to figure out how the virus could jump from species to species: “My lab has never performed or cooperated in conducting gain-of-function experiments that increase the virulence of viruses,” he said.

Shi, known as Chinese “Batwoman”, pointed out that the genetic characteristics of the viruses he is working on in his laboratory do not coincide with those of the coronavirus which has spread to humans since December 2019.

US President Joe Biden last month ordered intelligence agencies to investigate the origin of the pandemic, including the laboratory leak theory. The leak hypothesis had already been raised during the global epidemic, including by Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump, but it was widely rejected and viewed as a conspiracy theory.

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However, he has gained more and more strength recently, fueled by the reports three researchers from Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in 2019 after visiting a bat cave in Yunnan province (southwest China).

The laboratory leak theory has also gained ground in recent weeks after reports that six miners fell ill in 2012 with symptoms consistent with covid-19 – but also with those of a “seasonal infection” – after have visited a cave with bats in Yunnan Province China.

In light of this, White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci urged China to share the medical records of the nine people who suffered from the disease similar to Covid-19 before the start of the pandemic, and said that they could help determine if the virus could have emerged from a lab.

In an interview published Thursday in the Financial Time, Fauci said these medical records could answer crucial questions about the origins of covid-19 in Wuhan, where the pandemic began that has killed more than 3.6 million people around the world.

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“I would like to see the medical records of the three people who would have fallen ill in 2019,” said the immunologist. “Did they really get sick, and if so, what did they get sick of? ”

Fauci claimed that it is “totally conceivable that the origin of covid-19 is in this cave” that the team of experts visited, and that “has started to spread naturally or has passed through the laboratory.”

China, which fiercely tries to reject the laboratory’s hypothesis, has accused Washington of disseminating “conspiracy theories” and has denied American media information about the hospitalization of researchers in Wuhan.

The natural origin thesis, considered most likely by a joint study by experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Chinese who visited Wuhan earlier this year, argues that the virus appeared in bats before being transmitted to humans, possibly via another animal.

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