BEIJING, July 22. /TASS/. The Wuhan Institute of Virology has never designed, artificially created or leaked COVID-19, Head of China's National Biosafety Laboratory Yuan Zhiming said at a briefing on Thursday.
"The Wuhan Institute of Virology did not come into contact with, store or research the virus before Dec 30, 2019," the expert stated. He also noted that the institute had never developed, artificially made or leaked the coronavirus. Furthermore, until now, "no employees or students at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have been infected with the coronavirus," Zhiming went on to say.
The expert emphasized that the academic community had reached a consensus in regard to the natural origin of the COVID-19. Zhiming mentioned that there was currently no evidence that could prove the COVID-19 artificial origin and lab-leak theories.
Last week, World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that the second phase study into the COVID-19 origins in China was being prepared, so the organization expected transparency from the country’s authorities. The WHO chief noted that the first phase study faced certain challenges, in particular, a lack of data, especially regarding the start of the pandemic. Ghebreyesus has not ruled out the idea that a lab emergency could result in the spread of COVID-19. In response, the Chinese Foreign Ministry expressed hope that the WHO experts would pay more attention to the theory that the coronavirus was brought to Wuhan with frozen food, rather than leaked from a laboratory.
Investigation into the COVID-19 pandemic
The WHO experts arrived in China’s Wuhan city to study the origin of COVID-19 on January 14, 2021. During the visit, they examined the Wuhan Huanan seafood market, where the coronavirus outbreak was first recorded in December 2019, a number of city hospitals as well as the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s laboratory with the highest biological safety level.
At the final press conference on February 9, the experts said, they did not manage to achieve any major breakthrough, however, jointly with Chinese colleagues, they determined the main hypotheses for the origin of COVID-19, which is that the virus was transmitted from wild animals through an intermediate link. In their opinion, COVID-19 could first spread among one animal population, serving as a natural ‘reservoir’ in which the coronavirus mutated, and then crossed the interspecies barrier before infecting people.