China is coming under increasing pressure over probe into the origins of Covid-19, even as scientists are demanding more clarity to go into the roots of the global pandemic, reports Asian Lite News
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was engaged in military activity alongside its civilian research — amid renewed scrutiny of the theory that the Covid-19 pandemic emerged from the secretive lab.
“What I can say for sure is this: we know that they were engaged in efforts connected to the People’s Liberation Army inside of that laboratory, so military activity being performed alongside what they claimed was just good old civilian research,” Pompeo said, as per Fox News.
He further mentioned: “They refuse to tell us what it was, they refuse to describe the nature of either of those, they refused to allow access to the World Health Organization when it tried to get in there.”
Also Read
China is coming under increasing pressure over probe into the origins of the Covid-19, even as scientists are demanding more clarity to go into the roots of the global pandemic.
Sky News Australia host Andrew Bolt on May 26 spoke to Professor Nikolai Petrovsky, Director of Endocrinology at Flinders Medical Centre, who said that the world’s scientific community had been “tricked by China”, reported New York Times Post.
Andrew Bolt said on his show The Bolt Report: “Finally a lot of experts are now saying well actually it does now look like this virus maybe did escape from that Chinese lab and China is feeling the heat.”
Professor Petrovsky told him that although some Chinese scientists have suggested that Covid-19 originated from pangolins, this is unlikely to be the case, reported New York Times Post.
WHO team investigating the origins of Covid-19 in China found no evidence that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab.
However, the team was closely monitored by Chinese authorities during its investigation, and one of its members told UK news agency news that China refused to hand over key data from the initial outbreak, reported New York Times Post.
This week, the Biden administration pushed China for a further probe into a possible leak from the Wuhan lab. However, China state media rejected the idea that Covid-19 had originated there and said that it is “a conspiracy created by US intelligence agencies”, reported New York Times Post.
Study claims Covid-19 not natural
The coronavirus disease did not develop naturally, but was created by Chinese scientists in a Wuhan lab, who then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats, according to a breakthrough research conducted by a team of researchers.
The research, conducted by British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Birger Sorensen, is forthcoming in the scientific journal Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, the DailyMail.com reported.
In the 22-page paper, the researchers describe their months-long “forensic analysis” into experiments done at the Wuhan lab between 2002 and 2019.
It concludes that “SARS-Coronavirus-2 has no credible natural ancestor” and that it is “beyond reasonable doubt” that the virus was created through “laboratory manipulation”.
The paper also alleges of “unique fingerprints” in Covid samples that could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory and that “the likelihood of it being the result of natural processes is very small”.
“A natural virus pandemic would be expected to mutate gradually and become more infectious but less pathogenic which is what many expected with the Covid-19 pandemic but which does not appear to have happened,” the scientists wrote in the paper, according to the Daily Mail report.
“The implication of our historical reconstruction, we posit now beyond reasonable doubt, of the purposively manipulated chimeric virus SARS-CoV-2 makes it imperative to reconsider what types of Gain of Function experiments it is morally acceptable to undertake. Because of the wide social impact, these decisions cannot be left to research scientists alone,” they added.
Dalgleish and Sorensen wrote that they have had “prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China” for a year, but their theory was rejected by academics and major journals, the report said.
Dalgleish is a professor of oncology at St George’s University, London, while Sorensen is a virologist and chair of pharmaceutical company Immunor.
ALSO READ: China targets Fauci amid Wuhan lab controversy
