Coronavirus origin: Top Chinese scientist says lab leak shouldn’t be ruled out – BBC News 中文

“You can always doubt anything. It’s science. Don’t rule anything out,” Professor Gao told BBC Radio 4 podcast Fever: The Search for the Origin of Coronavirus.

Professor Gao is a world-class virologist and immunologist. After retiring from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention last year, he is currently the deputy director of the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Professor Gao also told the BBC that the Chinese government had conducted some sort of formal investigation into the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which may suggest that the Chinese government was taking the theory of leaks from the lab more seriously than its official statements suggested.

“The government organized some things,” he said, but his own department, the China Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was not involved.

We asked him to clarify whether this meant that another branch of the government had conducted an official search of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Wuhan Institute of Virology, one of China’s top national laboratories, has reportedly spent years studying the coronavirus.

“Yes,” he replied, “that lab has been double-checked by experts in the field.”

It was the first official acknowledgment that some form of investigation had taken place, but Gao said that while he had not seen the results, he had “heard” confirmation that the lab was innocent.

“I think their conclusion is that they followed all the protocols. They didn’t find any wrongdoing.”

The virus that causes COVID-19 almost certainly originated in bats.

But how it got from bats to us is a more debated question, with two main possibilities to begin with.

One is the natural transmission of the virus from bats to humans, possibly via other animals. Many scientists say that overwhelming evidence suggests this is the most likely scenario.

But other scientists say there isn’t enough evidence to rule out another major possibility: that the virus infected the people involved in the study, which was done to better understand the threat of viruses in nature.

These two possibilities are currently at the heart of geopolitics, at the vortex of a bunch of conspiracy theories, and one of the most politicized and toxic scientific debates of our time.

We shed light on this difficult but very important question through interviews with some of the leading scientists on all sides of the debate and on-the-ground reporting from the streets of Wuhan to the interior of a high-security lab in the United States.

When the new crown virus broke out in January 2020, Singaporean scientist Professor Wang Linfa visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where he was an honorary professor.

He told the BBC that a colleague at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been concerned about the possibility of a lab leak, but she was able to rule it out.

Linfa Wang is Professor of Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Duke-NUS School of Medicine and regularly collaborates with Professor Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

They are old friends and the world‘s top experts on bat coronaviruses, hence the nicknames Batman and Batwoman.

Professor Wang said Professor Shi told him that she had “lost sleep for a day or two” because she was worried that “there was a sample in her lab that she didn’t know about, but it contained a virus, contaminated something, and ran out”. .

But he said she checked her samples and found they contained no evidence of the virus that caused the new coronavirus or any other virus large enough to cause an outbreak.

He also said it was “impossible” for Professor Shi or anyone on her team to conceal the fact that they found evidence of the lab leak, as they acted as if nothing had happened, including going out to dinner and planning to sing karaoke.

Now declassified U.S. intelligence shows that several researchers at the Institute of Virology fell ill in the fall of 2019, with symptoms “consistent with the new coronavirus and common seasonal diseases.”

But Professor Wang told us that he suggested that Professor Shi take blood samples from her team in January 2020 to see if they had antibodies to the new coronavirus. He said she followed his advice and all tests came back negative.

Some scientists believe there is overwhelming evidence that the virus was transmitted to humans at a market in Wuhan. Professor Wang is one of them.

The Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan sells far more than its name suggests, including wild mammals. The market has been linked to many of the early cases in people who worked or shopped at the Huanan Seafood Market.

Despite the apparent lack of transparency in China’s performance, these scientists say there is now enough information, such as data on early cases and environmental sampling from the Chinese market, to rule out a lab leak.

In fact, this claim of certainty has been there since the beginning, most notably in a March 2020 paper. The paper has become one of the most read and controversial scientific papers of the internet age.

“The Proximal Origin of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)” is written by some of the most eminent scientists in the fields of virology and emerging diseases, who conclude that “we do not trust any laboratory-based hypothesis is credible.”

It supported the idea, which quickly became popular in many media reports, that the lab leak was a conspiracy theory.

But one of the paper’s authors said in a podcast that he now has doubts about the credibility of the previous conclusions.

Ian Lipkin, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, has long tracked the disease around the world, including China, where he has developed close ties.

He was also the scientific advisor for the Hollywood blockbuster “Contagion.”

Prof Lipkin now says excluding any laboratory-based assumptions from the paper went too far.

While he still thinks the market is still the most plausible explanation for the origin of the new coronavirus, and doesn’t believe the virus was deliberately engineered, he doesn’t think all laboratory or research possibilities can be ruled out.

He volunteered his theory, referring to another laboratory in Wuhan, run by the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, just a few hundred meters from the Huanan Seafood Market.

According to Chinese news reports, the lab was involved in collecting thousands of blood and fecal samples from wild bats, studies that were sometimes conducted without proper protective gear, an apparent risk of infection.

“The people working there probably got infected while collecting bats in the cave,” said Prof Lipkin, who was not aware of the lab or its work when he co-authored the March 2020 paper.

Professor Lipkin pointed out that further analysis of the Huanan Seafood Market as the origin of the virus – including a recent study focusing on evidence of raccoon dogs in the market – did not resolve the question of origin.

The virus may have “originated outside the market and was amplified in the market,” he said.

On the surface, Professor Gao’s remarks about not ruling out a laboratory leak appear to be seriously at odds with China’s publicly stated position, even dangerous.

“The so-called ‘lab leak’ is a lie fabricated by anti-China forces. It is politically motivated and has no scientific basis,” the Chinese embassy in the UK said in a statement.

But from another perspective, the two sides may have more in common.

The Chinese government has been pushing a strange, unproven third theory in its propaganda.

It said the virus did not come from a laboratory or market, but may have been brought into the country through frozen food packages.

The Chinese government says it rules out both labs and markets, and Professor Gao’s comments can simply be seen as a more scientific version of that position, as he rules out both. Both are opinions based on a lack of evidence.

“We really don’t know where the virus came from … the question is still unresolved,” Professor Gao told the BBC.

Scientists debate, sometimes vehemently, whether the question really is still open.

But there is one thing that is broadly consistent, at least outside of China: China is not doing enough to find evidence or share it.

While this might seem like an easy question, it’s anything but.

Where did the new coronavirus come from?

For every life lost, for every human being who suffered, and for those who continue to suffer, answers matter.