Regarding the idea that Covid-19 slipped from a lab, a former scientist employed by the Chinese government said, “you can always suspect anything.”
Professor George Gao, a virologist and immunologist, previously served as the director of China’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC) and is currently vice president of the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
According to what he said on the BBC Radio 4 episode Fever: The Search for Covid’s Origin: You can always have suspicions. It is science. Never discount anything.
In China‘s response to the pandemic and efforts to determine how it began, Professor Gao was crucial.
But China has always strongly refuted the suggestion that the virus may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory.
The Chinese Embassy in the UK said: ‘The so-called “lab leak” is a lie created by anti-China forces. It is politically motivated and has no scientific basis.’
Wuhan was the location of the first lockdown of the 2020 pandemic and where the novel coronavirus Covid-19 was discovered.
The capital of the Hubei province is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is one of China’s top national laboratories and spent years studying coronaviruses.
Professor Gao said some kind of formal investigation was carried out and ‘that lab was double-checked by the experts in the field’.
He said he has not seen the result, but has ‘heard’ the lab was given the all-clear.
Professor Gao added: ‘I think their conclusion is that they are following all the protocols. They haven’t found [any] wrongdoing.’
Many theories have been circulating surrounding the origin of Covid-19 since the pandemic again.
The going theory is that the virus spread from animals to humans, with many scientists saying the weight of evidence suggests a natural origin.
Recent analysis from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market – which was linked to several early cases – also backs up the suggestion that the pandemic could have started as a zoonotic spillover event.
Another idea is that Covid-19 infected someone researching the threat of viruses emerging from nature.
But the lab leak theory resurfaced in February when a United States government department report concluded the virus most likely emerged from such a leak.
But a previous investigation into the emergence of Covid-19 by the World Health Organisation found it was ‘extremely unlikely’ the virus leaked from a lab.
But the podcast reported the Chinese government refused a second phase of investigation, which would involve audits of laboratories in the Wuhan area.