China takes WHO team to Wuhan Bat Lab at the center of coronavirus conspiracies

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Few places they visit are as controversial as a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which officials in former US President Donald Trump’s administration suggested, without providing evidence, could be the origin of the coronavirus.

The laboratory in question, which is affiliated with the central government-run Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the only one in mainland China equipped for the highest level of Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4).

BSL-4 laboratories are designed to study the world’s most dangerous pathogens – pathogens with a high risk of transmission are often deadly and usually lack a reliable cure, such as coronaviruses.

Wuhan lab led by China’s ‘bat woman’

The Wuhan Lab was created in the aftermath of the deadly severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic that swept China and other parts of Asia in 2002 and 2003.

In particular, the Wuhan lab team led by virologist Shi Zhengli, known as China’s “bat woman” for years of virus hunting expeditions in bat caves, has focused on bat-borne coronaviruses, which is exactly what is believed to have caused the current pandemic. by.

Bats are an important reservoir for viruses, and although they do not suffer from them due to natural resistance, they are known carriers of many infectious pathogens devastating to humans, including Ebola, rabies, SARS and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) . . The current scientific consensus is that SARS-Cov-2, the virus behind the Covid-19 pandemic, also evolved in bats and then spread to humans, possibly with an intermediate animal host.

This makes the work of laboratories like the one in Wuhan all the more important, as understanding how viruses evolve and spread from bats to humans could better empower scientists to fight future infections. However, it also means that such labs can host a number of potentially deadly pathogens, and need to be extra careful to make sure they don’t escape.

While the clearly anti-Chinese Trump administration suggested this could have happened in Wuhan, most experts disagree.

In an article published last March in the journal Nature Medicine, leading infectious disease specialists in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia said it was “unlikely” that the novel coronavirus had emerged from a lab, citing towards comparative analysis of genomic data.

“Our analyzes clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a deliberately manipulated virus,” the paper said.

Peter Daszak, a member of the WHO team currently based in Wuhan and chairman of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit environmental health organization, said he had confidence in the lab’s safety protocols.

“I know that lab very well,” said Daszak, who has worked closely with virologist Shi in the past.

“It’s a good virology lab doing a good job and almost figuring out what the next SARS-related coronavirus would be. But as far as I know, it didn’t find it. But you know, unfortunately it might have turned out that way. people are now, ironically, starting to blame it. ”

Some have speculated that the WHO team may be limited in what they can see during inspections in China – especially as Beijing has begun pushing alternative, often completely baseless, theories about the virus’s origins – but Daszak said he hoped his personal relationships with the laboratory management mean they get everything they need.

“We have already spoken to (Shi) Zhengli, and she is open about these things. I hope we will have the same level of openness and transparency,” he said.

However, Daszak expressed concern that the broader investigation could be too late to find important information in Wuhan, where the first outbreak of the virus took place and is believed to originate.

“We could have done a good job here a year ago,” said Daszak, adding, “we’re getting good access … we’re constantly digging in to find more and more information on every possible path.”

Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is touring with Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, in her lab in a 2014 video.

Wuhan fish market visit

On Sunday, the WHO team visited the now disinfected and shuttered Huanan Fish Market, where a cluster of pneumonia-like cases was first discovered in late 2019 and has long been believed to be a possible cause of the outbreak.

Peter Ben Embarek, the WHO team leader and a food safety specialist, told CNN that “even if the place was sanitized to some degree, all the shops are there – and the equipment is there. of the market in the areas of maintenance, infrastructure, hygiene and goods and people flows. ”

The team was able to talk to locals and workers, Ben Embarek said, adding that it was too early in their research to draw any conclusions.

“It’s clear something has happened in that market,” said Ben Embarek. “But it could also be that other places played the same role, and it was just picked because some doctors were smart enough to match a few sporadic cases.”

Another member of the WHO team, Professor Thea Fisher, told CNN she was surprised by the “usefulness” of seeing a market abandoned in the past year. “We had some very good public health people with us who actually took some of the environmental samples on the market … and explained to us exactly where they took the ventilation system samples.”

Daszak, who specializes in zoonoses – diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans – said the market visit was “a critical point in my journey”.

“We got to see the place where every infected person who was confirmed in that market had a booth, you got a sense of how new it was, what the infrastructure looks like,” he said. ‘Would it have been a messy place, a busy, busy place? So that was extremely useful. ‘

The entire WHO team has warned that all the findings of the current study are likely to take a long time, and have spoken of the need to ‘manage expectations’ even when the world’s eyes are on them.

CNN’s Nectar Gan contributed to the reporting.

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