The theory that the Covid-19 virus originated from a leak at a lab in the Wuhan province of China in 2019 has been slammed by the country’s government as ‘politically motivated lie’. The response comes as the ex-head of the Chinese CDC warned not to ‘rule out’ the possiblity of the leak as one of the reasons for the spread of the virus.
Professor George Gao, who served as Director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from August 2017 to July 2022, said nothing can be ruled out when it comes to how the deadly pandemic started.
Interviewed for the newly-launched BBC Radio 4 podcast Fever: The Hunt For Covid’s Origins, Professor Gao said: “You can always suspect anything. That’s science. Don’t rule out anything.”
Professor Gao, who is now the vice-president of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, also claimed the Chinese Government carried out an investigation into the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
While the Chinese CDC wasn’t involved in this probe, Professor Gao said the lab was “double-checked by the experts in the field”.
The WIV, the leading institute in the study of coronaviruses that played a role in the global response to SARS in 2002, was one of the first laboratories in the world to receive samples of COVID-19 to study four years ago.
Professor Gao’s claim may lead to think the Chinese Government may have at one point looked into suggestion of COVID-19 spreading among the population following a lab leak.
However, the expert added that, while he has not seen the result of that investigation, he has “heard” that the lab was given a clean bill of health.
He said: “I think their conclusion is that they are following all the protocols. They haven’t found [any] wrongdoing.”
Professor Gao’s stance on the lab leak is in contrast to the position held by the Chinese Government, which has dismissed any suggestion the virus may have originated in a laboratory in Wuhan.
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The Chinese embassy in the UK told the BBC: “The so-called ‘lab leak’ is a lie created by anti-China forces. It is politically motivated and has no scientific basis.”
Speculation regarding a lab leak started circulating online shortly after the first news of the emergence of a new virus affecting humans in late 2019.
This theory was brought back to the fore in March, when FBI director Christopher Wray said the US agency believes the origins of the pandemic are “most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan”.
Speaking to Fox News, Mr Wray added he could not share many details about the assessment, but accused Beijing of “doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate” efforts by the US and others to learn more about the pandemic’s origins.
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Also in March, it was reported that the US Energy Department had assessed with low confidence that the pandemic had resulted from an unintended lab leak, adding the virus was not being engineered as part of a weapons programme.
Earlier this year, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said the involvement of the US intelligence community was evidence enough of the “politicisation of origin tracing”.
She added: “By rehashing the lab-leak theory, the US will not succeed in discrediting China, and instead, it will only hurt its own credibility.”
Professor Gao’s assessment appears to be close to the official position of the World Health Organisation (WHO), which in a 2021 report said it was “extremely unlikely” the virus had come from a Wuhan lab, but did not entirely rule out the possibility.
The virus, which up to May 24 killed worldwide 6,935,889 people according to WHO data, is widely believed to have been first carried by bats.
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