A new footage of bats caged in the Wuhan Institute of vIrology has again restarted the debate around the origins of COVID 19.
Caged bats inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology. nzherald.co.nz: Photo Credits
COVID 19: Ever since the debate around the origins of COVID 19 has been started, questions over the authenticity of World Health Organisation’s (WHO) investigation have been raised. Now, a photo from the Wuhan Institute of Virology has surfaced and has given another twist to the whole tale of origins of COVID19.
In the photo, live bats can be seen caged inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Again, this has refuted the WHO’s investigations into the origins of Covid-19.
The popular lab has been a centre of theory that claimed that the virus likely had a zoonotic origin, possibly transmitted through an intermediate host, but a laboratory origin of the virus was extremely unlikely. Even many scientists believed the same and stated that the virus has been leaked intentionally but not from the institute.
In December, a member of the WHO team, zoologist Dr Peter Daszak, wrote in a tweet that no bats were sent to Wuhan lab for genetic analysis of viruses collected in the field. This not the way science works. They collect bat samples, send them to the lab. They release bats where they catch them.
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Caged bats inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, nzherald.co.nz: Photo Credits
In another tweet, he said that this is a widely circulated conspiracy theory. He is the lead on this piece of work and with labs he had collaborated for 15 years.
He adds that they do not have live or dead bats in them. There is no evidence anywhere that this happened. It’s an error and hoped that it will be corrected.
Later, however an official from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, obtained by leading news portal, showed a May 2017 bats held in a cage at the institute four years ago.A scientist can also be seen feeding a worm to one of the creatures
Daszak changed his earlier denials earlier this month. He wrote on Twitter that the WHO team had not asked the institute if they housed bats.
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On Tuesday, the Chinese scientist,Dr Shi Zhengli at the centre of theories has denied that the coronavirus pandemic has originated from her institution and is nowhere responsible for the health disaster.
Shi is an expert of bat coronaviruses. Many scientists claimed that she could have been leading so-called ‘gain-of-function’ experiments in which scientists increase the strength of a virus to improve the study its effects on hosts.
As per the New York Times report, in 2017 Shi and her workmates at the Wuhan laboratory published a report on an experiment. The experiment involved the creation of new hybrid bat coronaviruses. For this, mixing and matching parts of several existing ones was required. The existing ones also included at least one that was nearly transmissible to humans. The reason for carrying out the experiment was to study their ability to infect and replicate in human cells.
However, in email to the paper, Shi denied the claims of the paper and stated that her experiments were different from gain-of-function experiments. The reason is they did not want to make a virus more dangerous. In fact, they were experimenting to understand how the virus might jump across species.
