By Ilana Siyance
The Chinese lab, where Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alleged that the novel and deadly coronavirus may have begun, has finally released a statement. The Wuhan Institute of Virology now admits that it has three live strains of bat coronavirus on-site, as per the lab director, who made the statements to Chinese State media on Sunday. The director, however, still insists that these strains are not the source of the global pandemic, which has killed over 340,000 people around the world, and infected over 5.3 million globally, as of Sunday morning. The Institute has since 2004 “isolated and obtained some coronaviruses from bats,” said director Wang Yanyi, in an interview, as per Agence France-Presse.
As reported by the NY Post, Yanyi denied the notion that the pandemic began in her lab, and called the Trump administration allegation a “pure fabrication.” She stressed that the strains are not the same. “Now we have three strains of live viruses… But their highest similarity to SARS-CoV-2 only reaches 79.8 percent,” Yanyi said, referring to the coronavirus strain that causes COVID-19. “It’s an obvious difference,” she said.
Further, Yanyi claimed that her scientists had never “encountered, researched or kept the virus” until it received the samples on December 30, when the pandemic had already unwittingly started in Wuhan. “In fact, like everyone else, we didn’t even know the virus existed,” she said. “How could it have leaked from our lab when we never had it?”
Chinese scientists have said from the onset that the virus first materialized in a Wuhan wet market selling live animals. The novel virus is supposed to have been transferred from bats to humans through another animal intermediary, but that theory too has yet to be proven. The US authorities voiced misgivings that it may have started in a lab. “There’s enormous evidence that that’s where this began. We’ve said from the beginning that this was a virus that originated in Wuhan, China. We took a lot of grief for that from the outset. But I think the whole world can see now,” Pompeo had said on ABC News’ in early May. “China behaved like authoritarian regimes do, attempted to conceal and hide and confuse. It employed the World Health Organization as a tool to do the same. These are the kind of things that have now presented this enormous crisis, an enormous loss of life and tremendous economic cost, all across the globe,” Pompeo had added.
The World Health Organization has repeatedly maintained that any allegations against a Wuhan lab are just “speculative”, and devoid of any proof. On Sunday, Chinese Foreign minister Wang Yi asserted that US politicians decided to “fabricate rumors” about the virus’ origins in order to “stigmatize China.” He said China would be “open” to international cooperation in identifying the source of COVID-19, so long as the search remains “free of political interference.”
