Director of Wuhan lab denies COVID-19 link
19 April, 2020
The director of a maximum-security laboratory in China's coronavirus ground-zero city of Wuhan has rejected claims that maybe it's the source of the outbreak, calling it "impossible".
Beijing has come under increasing pressure over transparency in its handling of the pandemic, with the US probing if the virus actually started in a virology institute with a high-security biosafety laboratory.
Chinese scientists have said the virus likely jumped from an animal to humans in market that sold wildlife.
However the existence of the facility has fuelled conspiracy theories that the germ spread from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, especially its P4 laboratory which is equipped to handle dangerous viruses.
In an interview with state media published Saturday Yuan Zhiming, director of the laboratory, said that "there is no way this virus originated from us".
None of his staff had been infected, he told the English-language state broadcaster CGTN, adding the "whole institute is undertaking research in different areas linked to the coronavirus".
The institute had already dismissed the idea in February, saying it had shared info on the pathogen with the World Health Organization in early January.
But this week america has brought the rumours in to the mainstream, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying US officials are performing a "full investigation" into the way the virus "got out in to the world".
When asked if the study suggested the virus could have come from the institute, Yuan said: "I know it's impossible."
"As people who carry out viral studies we plainly know what kind of research is certainly going on at the institute and the way the institute manages viruses and samples," he said.
He said that for the reason that P4 laboratory is in Wuhan "people can't help but make associations", but that some media outlets are "deliberately trying to mislead people".
Reports in the Washington Post and Fox News have both quoted anonymous sources who voiced concern that the virus may have come - accidentally - from the facility.
Yuan said the reports were "entirely based on speculation" without "evidence or knowledge".
Authorities in Wuhan primarily tried to hide the outbreak and there were questions about the official tally of infections with the government repeatedly changing its counting standards at the peak of the outbreak.
This week authorities in the city admitted mistakes in counting its death toll and abruptly raised the figure by 50 %.
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