But as the pandemic recedes in the United States, there is renewed interest by the scientific and journalistic communities about the origins of the vi

Was the US complicit in China’s Covid research?

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2021-05-27 22:00:08

But as the pandemic recedes in the United States, there is renewed interest by the scientific and journalistic communities about the origins of the virus and whether it could have escaped from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). So, a day later, the president opened a new investigation.

The flip-flop came amid Senator Rand Paul’s claim at a Senate committee hearing on the Covid-19 pandemic that the US collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to make a more deadly, transmittable coronavirus. That’s putting the Chinese lab leak theory, which Beijing vigorously denies, back at the forefront of the Covid-19 origin debate.

Based on papers published by WIV on the scientific work of Dr Shi Zhengli, the US government investigators have some catching up to do. In 2015, Dr Shi – popularly known as the “bat lady” – published a paper entitled “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses show potential for human emergence.”

Her colleagues on the study included American researchers associated with the University of North Carolina’s Department of Cell Biology and may be related to work funded by the US government.