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The P4 lab (left) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in central Hubei in China. (AFP)
Wuhan:
Located on the outskirts of Wuhan, the city at the heart of the coronavirus crisis, a Chinese high-security biosecurity laboratory is now the subject of claims by the United States that it may be the birthplace of the pandemic.
Chinese scientists have said the virus likely jumped from an animal to humans at a market selling wildlife in Wuhan, but the lab’s existence has fueled conspiracy theories that the germ spread from the facility.
The United States has now brought the allegations into the mainstream, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying that US officials are doing a “full investigation” on how the virus “came out into the world.”
Here are some key questions about the Wuhan Virology Institute (WIV):
What is it?
The institute is home to the Collection of the China Virus Culture Center, Asia’s largest virus bank that holds more than 1,500 strains, according to its website.
The complex contains Asia’s first maximum-security laboratory equipped to handle Class 4 (P4) pathogens, dangerous viruses that pose a high risk of person-to-person transmission, such as Ebola.
The 300 million yuan ($ 42 million) laboratory was completed in 2015 and finally opened in 2018, with the founder of a French bio-industrial company, Alain Merieux, as a consultant in its construction.
The institute also has a P3 laboratory that has been in operation since 2012.
The 3,000-square-meter (32,000-square-foot) P4 laboratory, housed in a square building with a cylindrical annex, is located near a pond at the foot of a forested hill on the remote outskirts of Wuhan.
On a recent visit, AFP saw no signs of activity inside.
A sign outside the complex said, “Strong prevention and control, don’t panic, listen to official announcements, believe in science, don’t spread rumors.”
Is it the source of the coronavirus?
Pompeo said on Friday that Chinese authorities themselves, when they began investigating the virus, “considered whether WIV was, in fact, where it came from.”
“We know that they have not allowed world scientists to enter that laboratory to assess what happened there, what is happening there, what is happening there as we speak,” he said in a radio interview.
The Washington Post and Fox News quoted anonymous sources as expressing concern that the virus may have accidentally come from the facility.
US diplomatic cables seen by The Washington Post revealed that officials were especially concerned about inadequate security standards related to investigators’ handling of SARS-like bat coronavirus investigators in the high-security laboratory.
Fox News said the “patient zero” of the pandemic may have been infected with a strain of the bat virus that is being studied at the facility that somehow got into the Wuhan population.
Several conspiracy theories about the supposed origin of the coronavirus in the laboratory have flourished online.
The institute declined to comment on Friday, but issued a statement in February rejecting the rumors.
He said he received samples of the then-unknown virus on December 30, determined the viral genome sequence on January 2, and sent information about the pathogen to the World Health Organization on January 11.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on Friday rejected allegations that the laboratory was responsible for the outbreak.
“A discerning person will understand at a glance that the purpose is to create confusion, divert public attention and evade responsibility,” said Zhao, who promoted conspiracy theories that the United States Army may have brought the virus to China.
What do scientists know about the virus?
Scientists believe the virus originated from bats before it passed to humans through an intermediary species, possibly the endangered pangolin, whose scales are illegally trafficked in China for traditional medicine.
But a study by a group of Chinese scientists published in The Lancet in January revealed that the first patient with COVID-19 had no connection to Wuhan’s infamous animal market, and neither did 13 of the first 41 confirmed cases.
The researcher at the Shi Zhengli Institute, one of China’s leading experts on bat coronaviruses and deputy director of the P4 laboratory, was part of the team that published the first study to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 came from bats.
In an interview with Scientific American, Shi said that the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence did not match any of the bat coronaviruses that his laboratory had previously collected and studied.
Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity researcher at King’s College London, said that while there is currently no proof of the laboratory accident theory, there is also “no real evidence” that the virus came from the wet market.
“For me, the origin of the pandemic remains an open question,” Lentzos told AFP.
There are some indications “that could point to a possible laboratory accident from basic scientific research,” he said.
“But all this needs considerable research so that anyone can say something for sure about the origins of the pandemic.”
David Heymann, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, also said there was no evidence on its origin, but that it is “closely related to a bat virus.”
“There are many theories as to how humans could have been infected, and I don’t think any of them can be verified today.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated channel.)
