Wuhan lab had three live bat coronaviruses: Chinese state media
24 May, 2020
The Chinese virology institute in metropolis where COVID-19 first emerged has three live strains of bat coronavirus on-site, but none match the new contagion wreaking chaos around the world, its director has said.
Scientists think COVID-19 - which first emerged in Wuhan and has killed some 340,000 persons worldwide - started in bats and may have already been transmitted to persons via another mammal.
However the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology told state broadcaster CGTN that claims created by US President Donald Trump and others the virus could have leaked from the facility were "pure fabrication".
In the interview filmed on, may 13 but broadcast Saturday (May 23) night, Wang Yanyi said the centre has "isolated and obtained some coronaviruses from bats."
"Now we have three strains of live viruses ... But their highest similarity to SARS-CoV-2 only reaches 79.8 %," she said, referring to the coronavirus strain that triggers COVID-19.
One of their research teams, led by Professor Shi Zhengli, has been researching bat coronaviruses since 2004 and centered on the "source tracing of SARS", any risk of strain behind another virus outbreak practically two decades ago.
"We know that the complete genome of SARS-CoV-2 is merely 80 per cent similar to that of SARS. It's an evident difference," she said.
"So, in Professor Shi's past research, they didn't pay attention to such viruses which are less like the SARS virus."
Conspiracy rumours that the biosafety lab was mixed up in outbreak swirled online for months before Trump and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brought the theory in to the mainstream by claiming that there surely is evidence the pathogen originated from the institute.
The lab has said it received samples of the then-unknown virus on December 30, determined the viral genome sequence on Jan 2 and submitted information on the pathogen to the World Health Organization (WHO) on Jan 11.
Wang said in the interview that before it received samples in December, their team had never "encountered, researched or kept the virus."
"In fact, like everyone else, we didn't even understand the virus existed," she said. "How could it have leaked from our lab when we never really had it?"
The WHO said Washington had offered no evidence to aid the "speculative" claims.
In an interview with Scientific American, Shi said the SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence didn't match the bat coronaviruses her laboratory had previously collected and studied.
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