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Coronavirus Expert Says Virus Could Have Leaked From Wuhan Lab
Food for thought[Daily Caller] * Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist who has been quoted as a coronavirus expert by The Washington Post and MSNBC, said Thursday that it’s possible that COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab. * Shi Zhengli, China’s leading virologist on bat-borne viruses, said in March that she lost sleep worrying that the virus could have leaked from her lab in Wuhan after she first learned of the virus in December. * Shi now tells those who share the concerns she once had to "shut their stinking mouths." "You wanna get me disappeared??" A molecular biologist who has been quoted as a coronavirus expert by The Washington Post and MSNBC said Thursday in no uncertain terms that the novel coronavirus could have been unleashed due to a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. China's top virologist on bat-borne viruses, Shi Zhengli, has sworn on her life that the virus did not leak from her Wuhan lab, saying that its spread was "nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits." But Richard H. Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday that there is a real possibility that the virus entered the human population due to a laboratory accident. When asked specifically if he believes the virus could have leaked from Shi's lab in Wuhan, Ebright said: "Yes." "A denial is not a refutation," Ebright said. "Especially not a denial based on ‘nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits.'" And while Shi now tells those who question whether her lab could be connected to the release of the coronavirus to "shut their stinking mouths," she previously said she lost sleep worrying about the possibility that her lab in Wuhan could have been responsible for the virus's release. Shi, known by her colleagues as the "bat woman" because of the 16 years she has spent hunting for viruses in bat caves, told Scientific American in March that she frantically searched for any evidence that her laboratory's records were mishandled upon learning of the virus's outbreak in Wuhan in late December. "Could they have come from our lab?" Shi recalled thinking. "I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China," she noted, saying that her studies had shown that southern China posed the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping from animals to humans. Shi said she breathed a sigh of relief when results came back showing that the sequences of the coronavirus did not match the viruses she and her team had sampled from bat caves. Uh huh....not that it wasn't altered... "That really took a load off my mind," Shi said. "I had not slept a wink for days." Shi and her colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology reported in early 2017 that after five years of surveying they had discovered 11 new strains of SARS-related viruses in horseshoe bats from China's Yunnan Province. The virologist said at the time that the 11 strains contained all the genes to make a SARS coronavirus similar to that of the 2003 outbreak. Shi contributed to a study published in February reporting that the novel coronavirus is 96.2% identical to a viral strain that was detected in horseshoe bats from the Yunnan Province. Posted by: Frank G 2020-04-03 |
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