Covid-19 virus leaked from China's Wuhan lab: US Republican report
August 02, 2021 20:19 ISTThe report also raises concern that the lab was conducting "gain-of-function" research in an unsafe environment.
The report also raises concern that the lab was conducting "gain-of-function" research in an unsafe environment.
The US and others say that China has not been transparent about what happened in the early days of the pandemic. China accuses critics of seeking to blame it for the pandemic and politicizing an issue that should be left to scientists.
Nanjing, which has a population of more than 9.3 million, plans to carry out city-wide nucleic acid testing after the campaign in Jiangning district concludes, the municipal government said.
Senator Paul suggested that Dr Fauci had lied before Congress when in May he denied that the National Institutes of Health funded so-called “gain of function” research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world — at a Wuhan virology lab.
In recent months, the lab-leak theory has gained great traction pushing US President Joe Biden to give the American intelligence team a 90-day deadline to find answers into the virus origin.
Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, described the removal of the sequencing data in a new paper posted online on bioRxiv on Tuesday.
The Wuhan lab has drawn global scrutiny because of its research on bat coronaviruses in the city where the pandemic began. The lab leak theory has recently become the subject of renewed public debate after several prominent scientists called for a full investigation into the origins of the virus.
The wild animals that were sold included mammals such as civet cats, mink and raccoon dogs, which are known to be susceptible to coronaviruses, along with squirrels, badgers, foxes and hedgehogs, as well as birds and reptiles.
At a US Senate hearing on May 11, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky) said that scientists in the US have long known how to mutate animal viruses to infect humans.
The head of China's Wuhan virology lab, also called as the 'bat woman', and an expert from the University of North Carolina in the US, had in a paper published in 2015 flagged the dangers of their gain-of-function experiment of a novel coronavirus which could infect human cells, media reports said.
A World Health Organization team is leaving China on Wednesday after gaining some new insights into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic that has now killed more than 2.3 million people worldwide — but with the major questions still unanswered.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has collected extensive virus samples, leading to allegations that it may have caused the original outbreak by leaking the virus into the surrounding community.
One of China’s top virus research labs, the institute built an archive of genetic information about bat coronaviruses after the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. That has led to unproven allegations that it may have a link to the original outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan in late 2019.
The Communist Party sees the WHO investigation as a political risk because it focuses attention on China’s response, said Jacob Wallis, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Watch our special report on connection between coronavirus and china's wuhan.
In a rare instance of criticism from the global body, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who is often accused of being pro-China, in a media conference in Geneva on Tuesday had expressed disappointment over China not finalising the necessary permissions for the experts team's arrival.
Research into COVID-19’s origins is critical to the prevention of future pandemics. Although a World Health Organization international team plans to visit China in early January to investigate what started the pandemic, its members and agenda had to be approved by China.
A team of 10 international scientists will travel to the Chinese city of Wuhan next month to investigate the origins of the novel coronavirus (Covid-19), the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.
Air India will operate its flight to Wuhan on October 30, the first after the central Chinese city from where the coronavirus initially emerged in December was officially declared safe from the virus in June and all curbs were lifted.
China on Friday claimed that the coronavirus broke out in the various parts of the world last year but it was the only one to have reported and acted first.
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