United States' House GOP report raises questions over Covid lab leak
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Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic that threw the entire world into turmoil, a furious debate has raged on about the origins of the Sars-Cov-2 virus. While China believes that the virus jumped from animals to humans, many have alleged that the virus actually leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In a new book, experts have investigated the various claims made by different groups and concluded it is “highly likely” the outbreak began in Wuhan, despite China suggesting that it may have come from Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and neighbouring countries.
In a column written for Spiked, biologist and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin Of Covid-19, Matt Ridley lambasted Chinese scientists who not only rejected the lab leak theory as a “conspiracy” but also criticised the theory the virus emerged from wildlife trade in the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan.
In a study published in the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, chinese researchers slammed a group of American scientists who suggested that the virus emerged from a seafood market.
They accuse the US-based scientists of “obfuscating the epidemic outbreak place… and the origin (ie, spillover) place” and of “overstating conclusions based on limited data and unrealistic simulations”.
Mr Ridley noted that this paper reveals the dilemma that Xi Jinping is in.
He wrote: [China] cannot concede that the virus started in its legal or illegal wildlife trade without huge embarrassment to the Xi Jinping regime, which has encouraged the first and tried to eliminate the second.
“But nor can it admit that the virus escaped from one of its labs without even greater humiliation.
“Yet it still cannot think of a remotely plausible alternative.”
Earlier this month, Beijing has lambasted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) as they continue to remain open to any possible theories of how COVID-19 began, including the controversial lab leak theory.
This latest statement contradicts their original assertion made after the publication of the first report, when WHO experts sent to China to investigate the origins, concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the coronavirus originated from a lab.
This 2021 report was slammed for not being thorough enough, with Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of WHO, later acknowledging that there had been a “premature push” after the first phase of the study to rule out the Wuhan virology lab leak theory.
However, in their latest report, the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO) added that “key pieces of data” have remained missing from China during their search how the origins of the pandemic.
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The authors of the report wrote: “The SAGO notes that there has not been any new data made available to evaluate the laboratory as a pathway of SARS-CoV-2 into the human population and recommends further investigations into this and all other possible pathways.
“The SAGO will remain open to any and all scientific evidence that becomes available in the future to allow for comprehensive testing of all reasonable hypotheses.”
The authors noted that lab accidents have been the trigger for some outbreaks previously, so the theory could not be completely ruled out.
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