US President Joe Biden last month ordered intelligence agencies to research the origin of the pandemic, including the lab leak theory.
Shi Zhengli, the highest bat coronavirus researcher at Wuhan Institute of Virology, has defended her institute amid involves a search into the origin of the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), including a hypothesis that it had been leaked from a WIV lab. She said there's no evidence and lamented the filth being poured "on an innocent scientist".
“How on earth am i able to offer evidence for something where there's no evidence?” she told the ny Times in rare comment to the media on the difficulty . “I don’t skills the planet has come to the present , constantly pouring filth on an innocent scientist,” she further wrote in her response sent through a text message.
In a March 2020 article in Scientific American, Shi said that the ordering of the virus that causes Covid-19 doesn’t match any of her lab’s samples. She also told the planet Health Organization (WHO) team, which visited China to seek out out the explanation for the origin of Covid-19, that each one staff had tested negative for Covid-19 antibodies.
US President Joe Biden last month ordered intelligence agencies to research the origin of the pandemic, including the lab leak theory.
The leak hypothesis had been floated earlier during the worldwide outbreak, including by Biden's predecessor Donald Trump, but was widely dismissed as a conspiracy theory.
But it's gained increasing traction recently, fueled by reports that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick in 2019 after visiting a bat subside the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan.
But Shi said during a research paper published in November last year that the workers' pneumonia-like symptoms were caused by a mycosis . Shi and her team also said in research published that they had retested 13 serum samples from four of the patients and located no sign they had been infected with Sars-CoV-2.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology houses a lab with a biosafety rating of "P4" - the very best possible - which is decided by the extent of danger and resulting security measures posed by the pathogens studied there. P4-level pathogens include people who cause diseases like Ebola.
The P4 lab is Asia's first and was built at a price of $42 million, opening in 2018.
The institute studies a number of the world's most dangerous diseases and previously conducted extensive investigations into the links between bats and disease outbreaks in China.
Its scientists helped shed light on the Covid-19 pathogen within the youth of the outbreak in Wuhan.
