London: British intelligence agencies now believe it is “feasible” that the Covid-19 pandemic began with a coronavirus leak from a Chinese laboratory, a media report said Sunday, prompting UK’s Vaccines Minister Nadhim Zahawi to demand that the WHO must fully investigate the origins of the deadly virus.
The origins of the Covid-19 remain a widely debated topic, with some scientists and politicians maintaining that the possibility of a lab leak of the deadly virus exists.
Western intelligence, including in Britain, at first considered there was only a “remote” chance that it had leaked from the laboratory, where research is conducted into bat-derived coronaviruses, including one closely associated with Covid-19. But there has since been a reassessment, and a lab escape is thought “feasible”, the Sunday Times reported, citing sources.
China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is near the outbreak’s known epicentre of Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, where the virus first emerged in late 2019 and became a pandemic. More than 168 million confirmed cases have since been confirmed worldwide and at least 3.5 million deaths reported.
“There might be pockets of evidence that take us one way, and evidence that takes us another way. The Chinese will lie either way. I don’t think we will ever know,” said a western intelligence source familiar with UK involvement in the investigation.
Agencies are believed to have few human intelligence sources in China. Gathering data there has focused on trying to recruit on the dark web, where Chinese employees can share secrets anonymously without fear of being caught, the paper said.
Meanwhile, an explosive new study has found that Chinese scientists created the virus in a lab in Wuhan and subsequently tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.
The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 virus has no “credible natural ancestor” and was created by Chinese scientists who were working on a ‘Gain of Function’ project in a Wuhan lab, the Daily Mail reported Sunday, citing a new research paper by British professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr Birger Sorensen.
The new research claims that scientists took a natural coronavirus “backbone” found in Chinese cave bats and spliced onto it a new “spike”, turning it into the deadly and highly transmissible Covid-19. The paper also quotes that researchers found “unique fingerprints” in Covid-19 samples that they say could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory.
Authors Dalgleish and Sorensen wrote in their paper that they had prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China’ for a year, but were ignored by academics and major journals, reported DailyMail.
The study alleged “deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data” at Chinese labs and notes the silencing and disappearance of scientists in China who spoke out about the activities.
The research is expected to intensify the ongoing debate on China’s role in creating the virus that has claimed thousands of lives.
In the 22-page paper which is set to be published in the scientific journal Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, Dalgleish and Sorensen pieced together how Chinese scientists, some working with American universities, allegedly built the tools to create the coronavirus.
In an exclusive interview with DailyMail, Sorensen said that four amino acids on the spike have a positive charge, which causes the virus to tightly cling to the negatively charged parts of a human, becoming more infectious.
Because these positively charged amino acids also repeal each other, it was rare to find even three in a row in naturally occurring organisms, while four in a row is ‘extremely unlikely’, he said.
“The laws of physics mean that you cannot have four positively charged amino acids in a row. The only way you can get this is if you artificially manufacture it,” Dalgleish told DailyMail.