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More than a year after the outbreak of the Corona pandemic from China to spread around the world, the origin and origin of the coronavirus remains an enigma even today.
In an Al-Hurra report, the site noted that in 2017, US diplomats and officials warned the previous administration of the danger from the Wuhan Institute, emphasizing that “Chinese laboratory scientists reported a severe shortage of properly trained technicians and researchers. necessary to ensure that viruses are safely contained. “
Politico magazine quoted an American who visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology years before the epidemic as saying: “We were trying to warn that this laboratory was a serious danger,” adding: “I thought it was possible that a virus similar to SARS spread again. I know it will become the largest pandemic in human history. “
But the warning cables, published in April 2020, did not receive the required attention from Washington.
China initially insists that the new Corona virus, scientifically known as (SAR-CoV-2), spread from a seafood market in Wuhan, which is a widely accepted story, but Beijing backed away from that and spread accusations against Italy. and the United States. .
WHO experts who visited China in January to investigate the origin of the disease ruled out the hypothesis of a coronavirus leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology near the seafood market, but the Director-General of the Health Organization confirmed subsequently that “all the hypotheses are still on the table.”
And earlier this month, the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced that a team of experts sent to Wuhan to investigate the origin of the Covid-19 epidemic will publish its report in the week that begins. March 15th.
The Story of the Warnings In late 2017, senior health and science officials from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing attended a conference in the Chinese capital, where they watched a presentation of a new study prepared by a group of Chinese scientists, including Wuhan scientists. Institute, in association with the US National Institutes of Health.
Since the 2002 outbreak of SARS in China, the deadly disease caused by the bat-borne Corona virus, scientists around the world have been looking for ways to predict and limit future outbreaks of similar diseases.
To aid in this effort, the National Institutes of Health has funded a number of projects involving scientists from the Wuhan Institute, including much of the work on bat coronavirus.
And American officials learned that these Chinese researchers found a group of bats inside caves in Yunnan province, giving them insight into how the SARS virus originated and spread.
But the interest of US diplomats was focused on the researchers’ discovery of three new viruses that have a unique property, which is the pointed protein (the spinal bumps), which the current Corona virus also possesses.
The spiny protein is characterized by giving an additional property to the virus to retain human lung cells, which causes a danger to human life. So health and science officials at the US embassy in Beijing decided to go to Wuhan and check it out.
The embassy sent 3 teams of experts in late 2017 and early 2018 to meet with scientists from the Wuhan Institute, including Shi Jingli, who has extensive experience studying corona viruses found in bats. When they sat down with the Chinese laboratory scientists, the American diplomats were shocked by what they heard, as the Chinese researchers told them they did not have enough properly trained technicians to operate the laboratory safely, and the Wuhan scientists requested more support. to bring the lab to the lab. the highest standards.
The diplomats wrote two telegrams to Washington about their visits to the Wuhan lab, saying that more should be done to help the lab meet the highest safety standards, and they urged Washington to do so, and also warned of a new discovery of corona virus. in bats, they could easily infect human cells.
But the US State Department did not respond to these cables, which were leaked to the public in April 2020 after the disease was classified as a global epidemic.
As tensions between the United States and China escalated over the course of 2018, American diplomats lost access to labs like those in Wuhan.
In the last days of the previous administration, last January, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement confirming that US intelligence has evidence that Wuhan Institute researchers had symptoms similar to Covid-19 during the fall of 2019. , which means that the Chinese government has withheld important information related to the outbreak of the disease for several months.
The article expresses the opinion of its author and is not necessarily the policy of the site.
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