What we know and what not about the Wuhan laboratory, the center of the crossing of accusations between the United States and China

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The versions that face the USA and China for the covid-19 3:01

Hong Kong (CNN) - Questions surrounding the origins of the new coronavirus have sparked a war of words between Washington and Beijing, and threaten to worsen already strained relations.

In recent days, United States President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have reinforced the claim that the virus originated from a laboratory in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the outbreak was detected by first time, last December.

Unsurprisingly, the claim has sparked a fierce rebuttal from the Chinese government, which on Wednesday described the accusation as a "sample" aimed at reinforcing Trump's chances for reelection. But the intelligence shared between the Five Eyes network , an alliance between the United States and four English-speaking allies, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, also seems to contradict the Trump administration's claim.

This is what we know, and what we don't know, about the claims and the laboratory at the center of the controversy.

• China rejects US claims that the coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab

How did China respond?

On Wednesday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry called the allegations a political strategy to "smear China" by Republicans ahead of the 2020 presidential election in the United States.

"The recently exposed Republican strategies show that they are encouraged to attack China on the pretext of the virus," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying said, adding that China was "fed up with such tricks."

"We urge the United States to stop spreading disinformation or misleading the international community. You should deal with your own problems and deal with the pandemic at home, "he said.

Hua also highlighted the fact that Pompeo did not provide any concrete evidence to justify the accusation.

"Mr. Pompeo cannot present any evidence because he has none, this matter must be handled by scientists and not politicians for their internal political needs," he said.

The Chinese government-controlled media have also rejected the claims, accusing the United States of blaming the others and launching a barrage of personal attacks on Pompeo. The state network CCTV called him "evil" and "crazy," while the state news agency Xinhua called him a "liar." The Global Times, a nationalist tabloid backed by the ruling Communist Party, said the top US diplomat "has lost his moral compass."

Beijing has repeatedly emphasized that so far there is no conclusion on the origins of the new coronavirus, saying the matter should be left to scientists and medical experts to study. He has been furious at calls for an independent international investigation into the origins of the virus and the initial handling of the outbreak in China, describing them as political maneuvers aimed at tainting the country.

The Chinese government has faced criticism at home and abroad for how it handled the virus, especially in the early days of the outbreak. He was accused of silencing whistleblowers and delaying informing the public about the severity of the crisis. But he has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, setting aside accusations of deliberate cover-up in the critical early stages.

Chinese officials and state media also filed unsubstantiated allegations alleging that the virus did not originate in China. In March, Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, promoted a conspiracy theory on Twitter that the virus had originated in the United States and was brought to China by the US Army.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian promoted a conspiracy theory on Twitter that the US military brought the coronavirus to China. (GREG BAKER / AFP via Getty Images)

In the meantime, tracing the origins of covid-19 has become a sensitive subject for national academic research in China. Last month, the Chinese government imposed restrictions on the publication of such documents, requiring them to receive additional scrutiny and approval from central government officials before being sent for publication.

What do scientists say?

Scientists so far have largely rejected theories that the new coronavirus was man-made. In February, 27 public health experts wrote a letter in the Lancet medical journal to condemn those conspiracy theories, citing scientific evidence that "overwhelmingly concludes that this coronavirus originated in wildlife."

In an interview with National Geographic, which was published Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the United States' leading infectious disease expert, said the current evidence points far to an artificial theory.

"(The scientific evidence) is very, very strongly inclined towards this, it could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated," Fauci said in the magazine.

"Everything about gradual evolution over time strongly indicates that (this virus) evolved in the wild and then leaped species."

• Shared intelligence among US allies indicates the virus outbreak probably came from a market, not a Chinese laboratory

In an article published in the journal Nature Medicine on March 17, leading infectious disease experts in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia said the new coronavirus was "unlikely" to emerge from a laboratory, citing comparative analyzes of genomic data. .

"Our analyzes clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully engineered virus," the document said, referring to the virus using the WHO-designated nomenclature.

Although its exact origin remains unknown, many experts believe the virus likely originated from bats and jumped humans from an intermediate host, perhaps a pangolin.

How did the coronavirus outbreak erupt? Markets, biological weapons, bats and other theories of the researchers behind the pandemic

Initially, Chinese authorities had linked the outbreak to a local market in Wuhan, where some early coronavirus patients had either worked or visited. At the time, some Chinese scientists had pointed to wild animals sold on the market as the likely source of the outbreak.

But that theory of particular origins has also faced questions in some quarters, after closer examination of the initial cases. A peer-reviewed article published by Chinese scientists in The Lancet on January 24 found that among the first 41 reported coronavirus patients, only 27 had been exposed to the market.

The Huanan wholesale seafood market in Wuhan City closed in early January following an outbreak of coronavirus cases. (NOEL CELIS / AFP via Getty Images)

What do we know about the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

The laboratory at the center of the Trump administration's allegations belongs to the Wuhan Virology Institute, an affiliate of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, administered by the central government. It is the only laboratory in mainland China equipped for the highest level of biocontainment, known as Biosecurity Level 4 (BSL-4).

BSL-4 labs are designed to study the world's most dangerous pathogens - those with a high risk of transmission, are often fatal, and most often do not have a reliable cure, such as coronaviruses.

The Wuhan Laboratory was created in the wake of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic, which spread through China and other parts of Asia in 2002 and 2003. After witnessing the devastation of SARS, the Chinese government decided to build a BSL -4, a laboratory to better prepare the country for future infectious disease outbreaks: a facility that can diagnose, research, and develop antiviral drugs and vaccines for new pathogens.

The laboratory amid controversy belongs to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an affiliate of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is controlled by the central government.

The Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory was designed and built with help from France. Construction was not completed until the end of 2014, and the laboratory became operational in January 2018, an event celebrated in the Chinese media as worthy of national pride.

"The laboratory will provide our nation with a comprehensive and advanced international biosecurity system, and Chinese scientific researchers can study the world's most dangerous pathogens in their own laboratory," a government statement said at the time.

Since then, the lab's chief virologist Shi Zhengli, known as the "Chinese bat woman" for her long years of bat-cave virus hunting expeditions, and her team have studied several bat-borne coronaviruses.

Shi's team has also been at the forefront of research to understand the new coronavirus. In early February, Shi and colleagues published an article in the respected scientific journal Nature, concluding that "the 2019-nCoV (new coronavirus) is 96% identical across the genome to a bat coronavirus" previously detected in horseshoe bats in southern Yunnan province of China.

Where do suspicions come from?

The Wuhan laboratory's portfolio of research and its proximity of the new coronavirus (approximately 12.8 kilometers) to the market has sparked a whirlwind of rumors and conspiracy theories within China since the early days of the covid-19 outbreak, months before the Trump administration to push its own theory that links the virus to the laboratory.

In one version of early rumors, an investigator was said to have been bitten by the bat he was studying and infected with the virus; Another version said that a high school graduate student was "patient zero." In an even more outrageous theory, the laboratory was said to be working covertly for the Chinese Army to make biological weapons, and the virus unintentionally leaked in the process.

Credible evidence was never offered for these theories that originated from unverified social media accounts. The rumors were so abundant that Shi, the director of the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, went to social media on February 2, to declare that she "guaranteed with her own life" that the facilities had nothing to do with the outbreak. The institute also repeatedly refuted the rumors in the statements, but suspicions lingered for some time before they finally subsided when the outbreak came under control in China.

However, in mid-April, Wuhan's lab came back into the spotlight after an opinion columnist for The Washington Post reported on two 2018 diplomatic cables, in which the State Department warned about security. and weak management in the laboratory.

In the following weeks, the United States Government has been studying the possibility that the coronavirus has originated in the laboratory and has been accidentally released to the public in a possible security breach.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement last week that the United States Intelligence Community "agrees with the broad scientific consensus that the covid-19 virus was neither man-made nor genetically modified." .

Intelligence shared among the nations of the Five Eyes group also appears to support that assessment. According to two Western officials, it is "highly unlikely" that the coronavirus pandemic has spread as a result of a laboratory accident, but originated in a Chinese market.

A third source, also from a Five Eyes nation , told CNN that the possibility still exists that the virus originated in a laboratory, but cautioned that there is nothing yet that makes it a legitimate theory. The source added that "clearly the market is where it exploded," but it is not yet clear how the virus reached the market.

- CNN's Steven Jiang, Isaac Yee, Alex Marquardt, Kylie Atwood, and Zachary Cohen contributed reporting.