Is Wuhan Institute of Virology Responsible for COVID-19?

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

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.”