Chinese communications on the subject are meticulous and firmly controlled. Beijing has always ruled out the hypothesis of a laboratory leaking about the origin of Covid-19 that triggered the 2020 global pandemic.
In a podcast produced by the BBC, the eminent Chinese virologist Georges Gao nevertheless advanced by saying that no track should be excluded. "You can always suspect anything. It's science. We can't rule anything out," he said when asked by a reporter about the lingering mystery about the origin of the deadly coronavirus.
Former head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CDC) which played a crucial role in the response to the pandemic, Professor Georges Gao is now vice president of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. He also suggests in the podcast, still half-heartedly, that the Chinese government has conducted a formal investigation into the Wuhan Institute of Virology, at the heart of suspicions if the hypothesis of a leak was confirmed.
" READ ALSO Origin of Covid: three years later, the mystery remains
«
The government has organized something," explained the virologist without going into details, adding to journalists' questions that "yes, this laboratory has been rechecked by experts in the field." "I think their conclusion is that they follow all the protocols. They found [no] wrongdoing," he also replied, relativizing his remarks.
Since the beginning of 2020, China has refused to open its archives to foreign scientists and Chinese researchers do not publish anything on the subject. And the WHO is also struggling to conduct a successful investigation. The hope of one day discovering the origins of the virus is dwindling and all hypotheses remain very open to this day.