A prestigious Chinese virologist warned of a possible bat-related virus almost a year before COVID-19 was discovered, but he was silenced.

Shi Zhengli is not just an expert. This is one of the most prestigious in China. A few months ago, the press in her country called her “The Bat,” because she was able to sequence the genes of the new coronavirus only three days after it became known that COVID-19 existed. However, his findings before this feat were drowned out by his own government.

Shih and his team of researchers from the Wuhan Virus Laboratory warned of the possibility of outbreaks of coronaviruses similar to SARS in China 11 months before a new epidemic of coronavirus in the city, writes Daily Mail.

The sharp warning was part of a research paper presented by Shi, the deputy director of the institute, and three co-authors in January 2019, almost a year before the outbreak that today threatens the world, with more than 150,000 dead.

At that time, Shi Zhengli and his colleagues from the Wuhan Institute of Virology emphasized the importance of conducting research on viruses from bats.

In this article, the team emphasized the likelihood of another coronavirus epidemic in China by analyzing three large-scale outbreaks caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS), and diarrhea syndrome. sharp pig (SADS), respectively.

They warned that all three pathogens are coronaviruses and that they can be attributed to bats, and two of them occurred in China.

Researchers insist: “Thus, future outbreaks of coronaviruses like SARS or MERS are very likely to occur in bats, and it is highly likely that this will happen in China.”

“Therefore, the investigation of bat coronaviruses becomes an urgent task to detect signs of early warning, which, in turn, minimizes the impact of such future outbreaks in China,” they explained then.

The team noted that China’s size, population, and biodiversity could contribute to the spread of a possible virus. He also emphasized the Chinese tradition of giving preference to fresh meat. “The Chinese food culture claims that slaughtered live animals are more nutritious, and this belief can improve the transmission of the virus,” the document explains.

According to Beijing News, a group led by Shih already in 2018 found that people could become infected with coronavirus directly in bats after research.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which houses more than 1,500 deadly strains of the virus, specializes in the study of the “most dangerous pathogens,” especially bats-borne viruses.

Although scientists believe that the virus got into the human body from wild animals sold as food on the market about 15 kilometers from the laboratory, conspiracy theorists make various assumptions. Some people claim that the virus, formally known as SARS-CoV-2, may be a biological weapon developed there. Others suspect that he escaped from the laboratory.

The institute, associated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has become a center of controversy in the context of the global crisis. Various theories claim that the virus came from an institute that has a four-story laboratory with the highest level of biological safety.

In fact, United States President Donald Trump himself said on Wednesday that Washington was trying to determine if coronavirus was first transmitted to humans by chance during experiments with bats in a Wuhan laboratory.

Shi, in a press statement last February, stated that he “with his life” ensures that the outbreak was not related to the laboratory.

COVID-19, a disease caused by the new coronavirus, has killed more than 150,000 people and has infected more than two million people worldwide since the Wuhan pandemic last December.

/ Psg