China rejects claim of illness at Wuhan lab in late 2019

In April 2012, six miners here fell sick with a mysterious illness after entering the mine to clear bat guano. Three of them died.

Chinese scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were called in to investigate and, after taking samples from bats in the mine, identified several new coronaviruses.

Now, unanswered questions about the miners’ illness, the viruses found at the site and the research done with them have elevated into the mainstream an idea once dismissed as a conspiracy theory: that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, the city where the first cases were found in December 2019.

The lab researchers thus far haven’t provided full and prompt answers, and there have been discrepancies in some information they have released. That has led to demands by leading scientists for a deeper investigation into the Wuhan institute and whether the pandemic virus could have been in its labs and escaped.

Even some senior public-health officials who consider that possibility improbable now back the idea of a fuller probe. They say a World Health Organization-led team had insufficient access in Wuhan earlier this year to reach its conclusion that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely.”

Most of those calling for a fuller examination of the lab hypothesis say they aren’t backing it over the main alternative—that the virus spread from animals to humans outside a lab, in the kind of natural spillover that has become more frequent in recent decades. There isn’t yet enough evidence for either idea, they say, nor are the two incompatible. The virus could have been one of natural origin that was brought back to a laboratory in Wuhan—intentionally or accidentally—and escaped.

A growing number, however, including the director-general of the WHO and a prominent U.S. researcher who has worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, agree that the WIV needs to provide more information about its work to categorically rule out a lab spill.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that three WIV researchers became ill enough in November 2019 that they sought local hospital care, according to a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report, though officials expressed differing views over the strength of the evidence. In January, the State Department had said that several WIV researchers became sick in autumn 2019 “with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.”

The Biden administration has recommended to the WHO that it lead a fuller investigation into the possibility of a lab leak, backing a call by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who has offered to deploy specialists. An investigation should include other laboratories in Wuhan, not just the WIV, and the team conducting it should include laboratory safety experts, according to a U.S. health official. “We should be able to look at biosafety records and interview staff members,” the official said.

The matter is likely to be discussed during a meeting of the WHO’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly, which started Monday. Diplomatic support for a lab investigation is thin. Few governments are eager to champion a probe that China could easily veto.

Beijing would be sure to resist any such effort and has tightly controlled access to information thus far. It denies that SARS-CoV-2 came from one of its labs or infected any WIV staff, and it wants the WHO to investigate whether the pandemic began outside Chinese borders. 

“The U.S. keeps concocting inconsistent claims and clamoring to investigate labs in Wuhan,” China’s foreign ministry said in a written statement. “This fully shows that some people in the U.S. don’t care about facts and truth.” It cited the WHO-led team’s verdict on the implausibility of a lab leak and urged Washington to invite the WHO to investigate early U.S. cases.

China’s National Health Commission and the WIV didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Hidden mine

Chinese authorities have obstructed independent efforts to investigate the mine, setting up a checkpoint nearby where unidentified men stopped several foreign journalists in recent weeks, on one occasion warning there were wild elephants ahead.

A Journal reporter reached the mine by mountain bike but was later detained and questioned for about five hours by police, who deleted a cellphone photograph of the mine. Villagers told the reporter that local officials had warned them not to discuss the mine with outsiders.

There was no sign of nearby villages being evacuated or any recent research activity at the mine. It was so overgrown that its entrance appeared to be inaccessible.

A growing number of virologists, biologists and other leading scientists are calling for a closer examination of the lab hypothesis.

Asked in a May 11 Senate hearing whether he thought the Covid-19 virus might have escaped from a Wuhan lab, Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said, “That possibility certainly exists, and I am totally in favor of a full investigation of whether that could have happened.” Dr. Fauci is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, which has funded coronavirus research conducted with the WIV. He has said previously that the Covid-19 virus mostly likely evolved and jumped to humans in nature.

Source:  https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-lab-leak-question-chinese-mine-covid-pandemic-11621871125