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Chinese scientist says don’t rule out lab leak theory

The Covid-19 lab leak theory cannot be ruled out, the Chinese government’s former most senior scientist has said.

Prof George Gao, a virologist and immunologist who led China’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC) during the pandemic, insisted ‘‘you can always suspect anything’’.

‘‘That’s science. Don’t rule out anything,’’ he said.

Gao, who took a leading role in China’s draconian pandemic response until last year and is now vice-president of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, also suggested that Beijing may have officially investigated the possibility of a leak from Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

‘‘The government organised something,’’ he told the BBC Radio 4 podcast Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origin. He added that an investigation was carried out by another branch of the Chinese government, not the CDC, and ‘‘that lab was double-checked by the experts in the field’’.

However, he insisted he has not seen the result of this investigation, but stated he has ‘‘heard’’ the lab was absolved. ‘‘I think their conclusion is that they are following all the protocols. They haven’t found (any) wrongdoing.’’

WIV is one of China’s top national laboratories and known to have spent years studying coronaviruses, before the first cases emerged in the city in late 2019, prompting searches of Wuhan’s Hunan seafood market and nearby hospitals.

The Chinese Embassy in the UK hit back, telling the BBC: ‘‘The so-called ‘lab leak’ is a lie created by anti-China forces. It is politically motivated and has no scientific basis.’’

The theory that the virus accidentally leaked from a laboratory resurfaced in February when the FBI’s director said the pandemic ‘‘most likely’’ originated from this source, although there is no consensus among US intelligence agencies.

The lab leak theory was widely condemned during the pandemic, largely as the result of a paper from various scientists including Prof Ian Lipkin, who is a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University in New York. The March 2020 paper stated a ‘‘laboratorybased scenario’’ was not plausible and following this study the discussion around Sars-CoV-2’s origins was shut down and shifted to the margins.

Lipkin, however, has told the BBC the claims in the study may have been too strong. He still believes the virus was not deliberately engineered, but now also says other options are possible and that not all lab-based scenarios can be excluded.

Lipkin also posits that another Wuhan laboratory, this one run by the Chinese CDC itself, could also be worth investigating. The lab was a few hundred yards from the Hunan seafood market which was the first known major superspreader event.

Chinese news reports of this lab from before Covid, where work involved the collection of blood and faeces from bats, allege that researchers were sometimes clad in inadequate PPE, raising potential infection risks.

It comes after Anton van der Merwe, a University of Oxford professor of molecular immunology, claimed in March that scientists dismissed the Covid-19 lab leak theory because they wanted to continue doing dangerous ‘‘gain-offunction’’ experiments to make viruses more deadly.

Wuhan researchers were importing bat coronaviruses and had applied for grants to increase their infectiousness, known as gain-of-function research.

The US Department of Energy found the lab leak scenario was the most likely, while Downing Street also said it was willing to consider it. However, the World Health Organisation said it was ‘‘extremely unlikely’’.

A spokesman for Rishi Sunak said in March that there were ‘‘still questions that need to be answered about the origin and spread of Covid-19’’.

‘‘The UK wants to see a robust, transparent and science-led review and believes all possibilities remain on the table until that is concluded.’’ –

World

en-nz

2023-06-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-06-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281938842297833

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