One of the scientists who signed a letter published in The Lancet on March 7 last year rejecting the lab-leak theory had links to Chinese researchers, their colleagues or funders.
Researchers from the Chinese government's Key Laboratory of Southwest China Wildlife Resources Conservation, the University of Oxford in the UK and the University of British Columbia in Canada collected data from several markets in Wuhan and photographs from the Huanan seafood market for their research which concluded that animals known as carriers of coronaviruses were sold at local wet markets for years.
The Wuhan branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention was handling coronaviruses “without potentially having the same level of expertise or safety or who knows,” Peter Ben Embarek said during a conference call in January, according to footage shown by TV2.
When WHO traveled to China earlier this year to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter Ben Embarek said he was worried about biosafety standards at a laboratory close to the market where the first human cases were detected.
Last year, Wuhan completed a comprehensive nucleic acid testing campaign, during which it tested nearly 10 million residents in 19 days.
The report also raises concern that the lab was conducting "gain-of-function" research in an unsafe environment.
The US and others say that China has not been transparent about what happened in the early days of the pandemic. China accuses critics of seeking to blame it for the pandemic and politicizing an issue that should be left to scientists.
Senator Paul suggested that Dr Fauci had lied before Congress when in May he denied that the National Institutes of Health funded so-called “gain of function” research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world — at a Wuhan virology lab.
In recent months, the lab-leak theory has gained great traction pushing US President Joe Biden to give the American intelligence team a 90-day deadline to find answers into the virus origin.
A report on the origins of Covid-19 by a U.S. government national laboratory concluded that the hypothesis claiming the virus leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is plausible and deserves further investigation
Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, described the removal of the sequencing data in a new paper posted online on bioRxiv on Tuesday.
The Wuhan lab has drawn global scrutiny because of its research on bat coronaviruses in the city where the pandemic began. The lab leak theory has recently become the subject of renewed public debate after several prominent scientists called for a full investigation into the origins of the virus.
The wild animals that were sold included mammals such as civet cats, mink and raccoon dogs, which are known to be susceptible to coronaviruses, along with squirrels, badgers, foxes and hedgehogs, as well as birds and reptiles.
At a US Senate hearing on May 11, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky) said that scientists in the US have long known how to mutate animal viruses to infect humans.
The head of China's Wuhan virology lab, also called as the 'bat woman', and an expert from the University of North Carolina in the US, had in a paper published in 2015 flagged the dangers of their gain-of-function experiment of a novel coronavirus which could infect human cells, media reports said.
A World Health Organization team is leaving China on Wednesday after gaining some new insights into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic that has now killed more than 2.3 million people worldwide — but with the major questions still unanswered.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has collected extensive virus samples, leading to allegations that it may have caused the original outbreak by leaking the virus into the surrounding community.
One of China’s top virus research labs, the institute built an archive of genetic information about bat coronaviruses after the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. That has led to unproven allegations that it may have a link to the original outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan in late 2019.
The Communist Party sees the WHO investigation as a political risk because it focuses attention on China’s response, said Jacob Wallis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Watch our special report on connection between coronavirus and china's wuhan.
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