The Wuhan Laboratory Leak Theory

Worrying photos emerged from a laboratory inside Wuhan’s secretive Institute of Virology. The released pictures show a broken seal on the door of one of the refrigerators, which holds 1,500 different strains of virus including the bat coronavirus samples which have jumped to humans with such devastating effect.

It is a rare glimpse inside the Chinese laboratory at the centre of the mounting international suspicion about the COVID-19 pandemic and will do nothing to dispel fears that a catastrophic leak caused the virus, which Beijing has covered up. The pictures, first released by the state-owned China Daily newspaper in 2018, were published on Twitter in March 2020, but later it was deleted. These pictures received many comments accusing China of the pandemic it has costed the world.

(Pictures from inside Wuhan’s secretive Institute of Virology show a broken seal on the door (centre of the shot, by medical worker's right eye) of one of the refrigerators used to hold 1,500 different strains of virus)

The institute had undertaken coronavirus experiments on bats captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan, funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US government. Sequencing of the COVID-19 genome has traced it to the bats found only in caves located at Yunnan. These revelations about the leak theory led to President Donald Trump saying the US was doing a very thorough examination of the horrible situation, the President went ahead to scrape US funding for the Wuhan institute and WHO for colluding with Beijing.

Health officials in China say they cannot let coronavirus guard down and that it never tried to cover up. A letter from the Chinese embassy in London said that The Chinese government had always regarded people’s lives and health as the top priority, and since the outbreak, the government had put in place the most comprehensive containment measures, which have proved to be effective. As the World Health Organisation said China has taken the most flexible and most active prevention and control measures, which altered the dangerous course of the virus’s quick spread and prevented hundreds of thousands of infections nationwide.

The letter continued to say that Beijing has been releasing information related to the pandemic in the most open, transparent and responsible manner, publicising relevant data since the early days of the outbreak.  Recently, following standard epidemiological practise, the authorities in Wuhan revisited the cases and revised the number of confirmed cases and fatalities on a factual basis. Data revision in the case of highly infectious diseases is a common international practice. At the early stage of an epidemic, a small number of medical facilities might be overwhelmed with a flood of new cases and not linked up with the disease prevention and control data collection system. At the same time, preoccupation with saving lives during the most challenging times of the epidemic could result in an inadvertent delay in reporting, under-reporting or misreporting at some facilities. However, there has never been any cover-up.

The relatively low COVID-19 death toll in China proves that the containment measures are effective. The strict lockdown measures have effectively slowed down the spread of the virus and minimised the cases of infection. Regarding reports of people in Wuhan queuing to collect urns, this was because funeral parlours were closed from January 23 to March 23. Urns of those who died of other causes in the past two months have been delivered. The lifting of outbound travel restrictions in Hubei province and Wuhan symbolises an initial victory against the virus and proves that the disease is preventable, controllable and curable.

Certainly, the reopening of Wuhan does not mean that China is lowering its guard. The Chinese government will remain vigilant against imported cases and a domestic resurgence of COVID-19. At the same time, it is getting the economy back on track, reopening factories and ensuring unimpeded travel within the country. Finally, the letter said that the incident that happened on the border between Hubei and Jiangxi provinces in late March was already resolved. It makes no sense exaggerating up something that is no longer an issue. At this critical moment, the media should send out positive signals to promote mutual understanding and co-operation, instead of whipping up anti-China sentiments and poisoning the atmosphere of international relations with China.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, many people have made accusations, speculations and vicious conspiracies against China. This has defamed China’s image and reputation despite going around the world giving aids to many countries in fighting the COVID-19.

Suspicions of a Chinese cover-up increased further after the Washington Post reported that US spies in Beijing had written cables about the Wuhan laboratory in 2018, warning the State Department that ‘the lab’s work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARs-like pandemic. US intelligence sources say that shortly after the coronavirus outbreak began, officials at the lab destroyed samples of the virus, erased early reports and sup-pressed the academic papers and then tried to pin the blame on Wuhan’s wet market, where wild animals are sold for consumption. The sources believe that ‘Patient Zero’ was an intern at the lab, who spread the virus into the local population after infecting her boyfriend.

After initially accepting the wet market theory, intelligence officials in the US, Britain, Germany, Russia, Canada and other countries are increasingly focusing on the Wuhan institute, not least because of the level of coincidence required for the bats in Yunnan to have infected animals in Wuhan, which then passed it on to humans. Following a recent video meeting of the G7 nations, French President Emmanuel Macron said there were clearly things that have happened and the world does not know about. The World Health Organisation, which faces allegations of complicity with Beijing over the pandemic, quickly accepted and propagated the wet market theory. Although some scientific sources suggest that the virus was ‘zoonotic’ (originating from an animal), that is still compatible with the theory that it first passed to humans because of an accident by scientists in a laboratory.

However, one political source said that there was a growing scientific curiosity over the symptoms of a marked loss of taste and smell in many victims of COVID-19. This might indicate a level of human interference. Beijing insists that the fact that the country’s primary virology institute is based in the Wuhan city at the centre of the outbreak is just a coincidence, dismissing links to the laboratory as ‘baseless conspiracy theories’.

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Published by Ruzeki on April 22, 2020, 1345 EAT