Scientists working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) published a report concluding that the virus most likely originated in pangolins, a study Chinese state media insisted on Tuesday made it “unlikely” that the virus leaked from the facility.
The report on the genetic profile of the Chinese coronavirus, published Friday, itself proves that the WIV has been studying highly contagious coronaviruses, including the Chinese coronavirus, and is thus likely in possession of samples. Following the publication of a report by the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) in March that found no animal reservoirs in Wuhan’s Hubei province for the Chinese coronavirus after testing tens of thousands of animals, international scientists have reconsidered the possibility that a sample of the Chinese coronavirus, known formally as “SARS-CoV-2,” first infected humans through exposure at the WIV.
The Wall Street Journal published a report on Sunday claiming that a U.S. government document detailed the hospitalizations of several laboratory workers in late 2019, shortly before doctors confirmed the first cases of Chinese coronavirus among the general public. The document echoed public statements in a fact sheet published by the U.S. State Department last year.
Scientists consider bats and pangolins the likeliest animals to have hosted the novel coronavirus discovered in China in late 2019. The WIV report published on Friday, the Chinese government propaganda outlet Global Times noted, concluded that “none of the known viruses of the bat SARSr-CoV-2 lineage or its novel variant use the human ACE2 as efficiently as SARSr-CoV-2 from pangolins or some of the SARSr-CoV-1 lineage viruses.”
SARSr-CoV-1 is the formal name for the coronavirus that causes Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which killed 774 people, most of them in Asia, in 2003. The Global Times concluded the WIV research shows that the SARS virus, which appears most related to coronaviruses hosted by bats, appears to have a different origin than the Chinese coronavirus, which appears more similar to viruses in pangolins. It did appear to suggest that the pangolins, mammals similar to anteaters prized by practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for their alleged healing properties, initially came into contact with what would eventually become the Chinese coronavirus through bats.
“The report still did not explain how the virus was transferred and adapted from bats to humans via pangolins,” the Global Times noted, citing Chinese scientists. The WIV report also appeared only to dismiss the possibility that the Chinese coronavirus was created through genetic experiments in a laboratory, not that the laboratory may have possessed samples of a naturally occurring virus that accidentally came to infect the public.
“When we say a virus is from a lab, we are indicating that either the virus, or a highly similar virus, is leaked from a lab, or a virus is manufactured by man in a lab. But the two possibilities have both been refuted so far by scientific research,” a Chinese government “expert” told the Global Times on Tuesday.
Chinese media’s insistence on Tuesday that the Chinese coronavirus could not have escaped from a laboratory contradicts repeated accusations by the Chinese Foreign Ministry against the U.S. Army. Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian first suggested in March 2020 that the virus escaped from a laboratory at the U.S. Army facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland, citing no evidence for this claim. The Foreign Ministry has consistently asserted since that original claim that international investigators should explore the possibility of a laboratory leak at Fort Detrick, despite no significant signs of coronavirus infections in the area at times prior to the initial outbreak in Wuhan.
The Global Times‘ assertions on Tuesday appear to exonerate Fort Detrick as well as the WIV.
Speculation surrounding the origin of the Chinese coronavirus, which has killed at least 3.4 million people since first discovered in Wuhan, has increased since the W.H.O. sent a team to the city in early 2021 to study the topic. The final report by the investigative team concluded that the likeliest scenario for how the pandemic began is that humans came into contact with an intermediary species carrying the virus after it came into contact with the original host species. The report also stated that a laboratory accident was an extremely unlikely possibility.
Notably, the report — based on investigations heavily controlled by the Chinese Communist Party conducted a year after the Party admitted to destroying critical evidence, including early samples of the virus — did not present any evidence of an animal host for the virus. Out of 80,000 animals tested in China, none tested positive for Chinese coronavirus, it concluded.
The Chinese government and the WIV have denied the evidence in the document allegedly obtained by the Wall Street Journal that employees of the WIV required hospitalization for respiratory infections in November 2019, when scientists believe the pandemic began. Yuan Zhiming, a director at the WIV, described the report as “an outright lie that came from nowhere.”