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Post by Admin on Apr 16, 2020 8:32:41 GMT
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday his government is trying to determine whether the coronavirus emanated from a lab in Wuhan, China, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Beijing “needs to come clean” on what they know.
The source of the virus remains a mystery. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that U.S. intelligence indicates that the coronavirus likely occurred naturally, as opposed to being created in a laboratory in China, but there is no certainty either way.
Fox News reported on Wednesday that the virus originated in a Wuhan laboratory not as a bioweapon, but as part of China’s effort to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States.
This report and others have suggested the Wuhan lab where virology experiments take place and lax safety standards there led to someone getting infected and appearing at a nearby “wet” market, where the virus began to spread.
At a White House news conference Trump was asked about the reports of the virus escaping from the Wuhan lab, and he said he was aware of them.
“We are doing a very thorough examination of this horrible situation that happened,” he said.
Asked if he had raised the subject in his conversations with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump said: “I don’t want to discuss what I talked to him about the laboratory, I just don’t want to discuss, it’s inappropriate right now.”
Trump has sought to stress strong U.S. ties with China during the pandemic as the United States has relied on China for personal protection equipment desperately needed by American medical workers.
As far back as February, the Chinese state-backed Wuhan Institute of Virology pushed dismissed rumors that the virus may have been artificially synthesized at one of its laboratories or perhaps escaped from such a facility.
Pompeo, in a Fox News Channel interview after Trump’s news conference, said “we know this virus originated in Wuhan, China,” and that the Institute of Virology is only a handful of miles away from the wet market.
“We really need the Chinese government to open up” and help explain “exactly how this virus spread,” said Pompeo.
“The Chinese government needs to come clean,” he said.
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Post by Admin on Apr 16, 2020 20:46:29 GMT
The £30-million institute, based 16km from the infamous wildlife market, is supposed to be one of the most secure virology facilities in the world, the report said, capable of conducting experiments with highly pathogenic microorganisms such as Ebola. Scientists at the institute were the first to suggest that the virus’s genome was 96% similar to one commonly found in bats.  But despite its reputation for high security, there have been unverified reports that workers at the institute became infected after being sprayed by blood, and then carried the infection into the local population, the report said. A second institute in the city, the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control – which is barely 5km from the market — is also believed to have carried out experiments on animals such as bats to examine the transmission of coronaviruses, the report said. One theory floating around CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., also suggests it was possible a lower paid employee at the lab sold an infected animal to the wet market to make extra money, instead of incinerating it. American biosecurity expert Professor Richard Ebright, of Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, New Jersey, said that while the evidence suggests Covid-19 was not created in one of the Wuhan labs, it could easily have escaped from there while it was being analyzed, the report said. Prof Ebright said he has seen evidence that scientists at the Centre for Disease Control and the Institute of Virology studied the viruses with only “level 2” security — rather than the recommended level 4 – which “provides only minimal protection against infection of lab workers,” the report said. He concluded that the evidence left “a basis to rule out [that coronavirus is] a lab construct, but no basis to rule out a lab accident.” Intriguingly, when the wildlife market was closed in January, a report appeared in the Beijing News identifying Huang Yanling, a researcher at the Institute of Virology, as “patient zero” – the first person to be infected. The claim was described as “fake information” by the institute, which said Huang left in 2015, was in good health and had not been diagnosed with Covid-19. “In January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing took the unusual step of repeatedly sending U.S. science diplomats to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which had in 2015 become China’s first laboratory to achieve the highest level of international bioresearch safety (known as BSL-4). WIV issued a news release in English about the last of these visits, which occurred on March 27, 2018. The U.S. delegation was led by Jamison Fouss, the consul general in Wuhan, and Rick Switzer, the embassy’s counselor of environment, science, technology and health. Last week, WIV erased that statement from its website, though it remains archived on the Internet.” Worth noting, at least one young researcher from the lab —Huang Yanling — a graduate student rumored to be patient zero — was scrubbed from the lab’s website1. The first, mysterious samples from infected individuals arrived at Wuhan Institute of Virology on December 30, 2019. According to the Scientific American magazine, Shi Zhengli, a renown bat scientist in China, was told by the Institute’s director that the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention — modeled after our own CDC — had detected a novel coronavirus in two hospital patients. They were suffering from an odd pneumonia. They wanted her laboratory to investigate because the virus belonged to the same family of bat-borne viruses that caused SARS, a disease that — by comparison — only infected 8,100 people and killed just under 800 in an 8 month period in 2002-03. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” she was quoted as saying by Scientific American2 on March 11. Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical areas of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan had the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir for many viruses. If bat coronaviruses were the culprit, she recalled to Scientific American, “could they have come from our lab?” She has since promised the world that it did not come from her lab, though how she would know that for sure is unknown. We don’t know where she is. If she is making the media rounds on Chinese television, few in the U.S. would believe her at this point. Her research on bat coronaviruses goes back to 2015. Here is one published in 2015 in Nature magazine3. There is a lot of information about this new SARS, yet the world still seems stuck in the unknowns. 1. www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2020/02/18/WHO-confirms-experts-presence-at-coronavirus-epicenter-in-China/8271582041808/2. www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-chinas-bat-woman-hunted-down-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/3. www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
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Post by Admin on Apr 16, 2020 23:20:30 GMT
 A research fellow from Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19), refuted rumors that claimed she accused the head of the institute of "leaking virus" from the lab. She cautioned the public to "be alert for conspiracies." "I never released any information on reporting others and I am in great indignation for people who use my name to fabricate the reporting message," Chen Quanjiao, a research fellow from Wuhan Institute of Virology, said in her statement released on the website of the institute on Monday. Chen said that she will hold those people legally liable who make fake news. The recent rumors on the institute have affected research work, she said. The statement came after a Sina Weibo user called "Weiketiezhi" made a post on Monday, claiming that Chen reported the head of the institute Wang Yanyi because Wang "sold experimental animals" to Huanan Seafood Market and "leaked the virus" from the lab. Huanan Seafood Market has been considered the source of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan. "The recent rumors on the institute have affected the researchers tackling key problems. We hope the public can keep high alert on relevant conspiracy and destructive activities," Chen said in the Monday statement.  Chen Quanjiao, a researcher with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has refuted an online rumor that claimed the novel coronavirus was leaked from the institute, according to a statement published on its official website on Monday evening. Someone faked her identity, she said. "I have never posted any such things, and I'm indignant about the fabrication of the rumor using my identity. I will pursue legal action against the rumor-maker according to the law," Chen said in the statement. The statement came after a rumor went viral on Chinese social media platform Weibo, saying Chen reported Wang Yanyi, director of the institute, for leaking the virus. Her ID number was included in the fabricated post on Weibo. "Recently, a series of rumors have affected our front-line scientific research personnel. Please strictly guard against related plots and sabotage activities," she said. Chen has been working on influenza viruses at the institute since 2001, according to the official website.
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Post by Admin on Apr 18, 2020 19:20:52 GMT
The latest outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in China, with eight confirmed or suspected cases so far and hundreds quarantined, involves two researchers who were working with the virus in a Beijing research lab, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday (April 26). “We suspect two people, a 26-year-old female postgraduate student and a 31-year-old male postdoc, were both infected, apparently in two separate incidents,” Bob Dietz, WHO spokesman in Beijing, told The Scientist. The woman was admitted to hospital on April 4, but the man apparently became infected independently 2 weeks later, being hospitalized on April 17. Both worked at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing, part of China's Center for Disease Control. At a news conference in Manila this morning, Associated Press reported, WHO Western Pacific Regional Director Shigeru Omi criticized the laboratory's safeguards and said the authorities did not know yet whether any foreigners had been carrying out medical research in the facility and had since left the country. Laboratory safety “is a serious issue that has to be addressed,” he said. “We have to remain very vigilant.” China has level three research guidelines and rules in place for handling the SARS virus, which are “of acceptable quality” to WHO, Dietz told The Scientist. But “it's a question of procedures and equipment. Frankly we are going to go in now a take a very close look,” he said. “We have a team of two or three international experts that's arriving in a day or two. They are going to go into the labs with Ministry of Health people and find out what happened here,” Dietz said. “We've been told we'll have full access, be able to test all the surfaces, interview people who worked there, and look at documentation to find out what was being done,” Dietz said. “We're not releasing the names of the experts yet, but once you see the names you'll recognize them. They will be international experts from the relevant disciplines.” In the meantime, the lab has been closed, and the 200 staff have been put in isolation in a hotel near another lab in Cham Ping, about 20 kilometers North of Beijing. China is rushing its own investigative teams to check lab security, according to state media.  Antoine Danchin, an epidemiologist with the Hong Kong University–Pasteur Research Center, who studied the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong, told The Scientist the latest incidents were probably the result of lab accidents. “Normally, it's not possible to contaminate people even under level two confinement, if the security rules are obeyed, with the appropriate hoods, and so on,” Danchin said. SARS work requires level three. “So it suggests there has been some mishandling of something.” “The lab might have all the right rules, but the people may not comply! For example, notebooks are not supposed to be taken out, a lot of things like that. A virus doesn't jump on people!” Danchin said.However WHO Beijing is relatively sanguine about the current threat, despite the fact that the 26-year-old infected had taken a long journey on the country's rail network. The index cases are known, and contacts had been traced, Dietz said. “We see no significant public health threat at this point.”
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Post by Admin on Apr 18, 2020 22:45:16 GMT
In the last week, some administration officials have leaked to the press, including in a Washington Post column by Josh Rogin, that some in the government believe the virus may have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or possibly from the nearby Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Rogin's sources said that State Department officials had raised concerns about the practices at the Institute of Virology, although the column was clear that there is no hard, non-circumstantial evidence that the coronavirus emerged from the labs. Some scientists have argued that COVID-19 could not have come from a lab, while experts are virtually unanimous in their belief that the virus could not have been intentionally engineered.  So what is the Wuhan Institute of Virology? It's an institute that has done cutting-edge research on viruses and bats- and it also warned, in early 2019, that bat-based viruses originating in China could cause future pandemics. Among the personnel from the lab who met with the State Department team, per Rogin, was Shi Zhengli, a world-renowned researcher into bat-based viruses, and part of the team that, in 2005, determined that the SARS virus originated in bats. Shi's work has often taken her to caves in remote areas of China, and she was called in almost immediately following the discovery of what's now called the coronavirus. Described as "Bat Woman" in a Scientific American profile last month that provides a useful tick-tok of the virus' discovery, Shi is an expert on those types of diseases, who had warned in advance of the likelihood of such diseases leading to pandemics in the future. She went on to quickly sequence COVID-19.  This week, a Daily Mail report alleged that Shi's findings were suppressed by her bosses at the institute, and ultimately by the Chinese government. Shi, per the report, had in early January sequenced the virus' genetic makeup within three days, and determined that it was similar to SARS. However, the institute's director, Yanyi Wang, emailed staff telling them not to disclose that information publicly. It is true that this email was sent. However, the information did not remain secret for long, as the discovery of the genome was announced on January 9, via an open-access platform. Shi’s team then released its data on the 23rd, and it was published in Nature in February.  Shi and her team have denied that the COVID-19 virus could have come from the lab, with Shi having "guaranteed with her own life" that the virus had nothing to do with the lab's work. She also said in the Scientific American interview last month that none of the viruses in her disposal records matched the genome of COVID-19. So essentially, if the virus did come from the lab, it would mean that Shi is either wrong or not telling the truth. In reaction to the Mail story, as well as various conspiracy videos that have alleged dark motives in Shi's work, Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance and a man quoted in the Scientific American profile, praised his "colleague and friend" Shi on Twitter. "Insulted, threatened by conspiracy theorists in US & China. Pressured by her own govt," he wrote. "World class virologist, 1st to identify origin of SARS-CoV-2 & wonderful generous person. She should be lauded as hero, not vilified." Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons.
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