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
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