By Thomas Seal
Virus samples sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology seven years ago closely resemble Covid-19, according to a Sunday Times report highlighting unanswered questions about the origins of the global pandemic.
In 2013, scientists sent frozen samples to the Wuhan laboratory from a former bat-infested copper mine in southwest China after six men who had been cleaning the bats’ feces contracted severe pneumonia, the newspaper said.
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Three of them died and the most likely cause was a bat-borne coronavirus, the Sunday Times reported, citing a doctor whose supervisor worked in the emergency department who treated the men. The same mine in Yunnan province was subsequently studied by Shi Zhengli, a bat-like coronavirus expert similar to SARS at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Shi, nicknamed “bat woman” for her bat cave expeditions, described Covid-19 in a February 2020 article, saying it was 96.2% similar to a coronavirus sample called RaTG13 obtained in Yunnan in 2013. The Sunday Times said that RaTG13 is “almost certainly” the virus that was found in the abandoned mine.
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The differences between the samples may still represent decades of evolutionary distance, according to dissident scientists cited in the article. The Sunday Times said that Wuhan’s laboratory did not answer his questions.
In May, the director of the Wuhan Virology Institute said there was no live copy of the RaTG13 virus in the lab, so it would have been impossible for it to leak. There is no evidence that the laboratory was the source of the global outbreak that started in Wuhan. But the President of the United States, Donald Trump, claimed in May that he had seen evidence of the theory, contradicting the intelligence services.
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