She says stop accusations and conspiracy theories. The director of the Wuhan Institute of Chinese Virology, regularly singled out by the United States, says that the laboratory she runs has three live strains of bat coronaviruses, but none of them correspond to Covid-19.
According to most scientists, the new coronavirus has been transmitted to humans from an animal. A city market has been accused of selling live wild animals. But the existence a few kilometers away of a virology institute has fueled for months the hypotheses of a Covid-19 leak from these sensitive installations.
Following press reports, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo himself spoke at the beginning of the month of an "investigation" to dig into this theory, which for the moment is not based on anything very tangible.
"Three strains of live virus"
These suspicions are "pure fabrication", said the director of the establishment, Wang Yanyi, on public television CGTN. "Like everyone, we did not even know that the virus existed," she said in an interview broadcast on Saturday evening by the channel but carried out on May 13. "So how could he have escaped from our laboratory?" She asked.
The first patients with the new coronavirus were reported at the end of last year in Wuhan city. It has since spread across the planet, killing some 340,000 people. Several theories, more or less exuberant, have flourished in recent months on the Internet to incriminate the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Its director admitted that the establishment had "isolated and obtained certain coronaviruses from bats", adding that the laboratory had "three strains of live virus". But, she said, their similarity to the Covid-19 "is only 79.8%".
The Wuhan Institute of Virology studies some of the most dangerous pathogens in the world. Researchers at the institution notably helped to better understand Covid-19 at the start of the epidemic. Their work was published in February in a scientific journal.
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Their research has shown that the genome sequence of the new coronavirus is 80% similar to that of SARS, which caused a previous epidemic in 2002-3, and 96% to that of a bat coronavirus.
VIDEO. Coronavirus: the origin of Covid-19 is "natural" says WHO
