“It’s far more likely that Mother Nature is just a step ahead of us and has created a novel pathogen, now able to move quite effectively from human to human,” said Jason Rao, a biosecurity specialist, former senior policy adviser to President Barack Obama and executive director of Health Security Partners, a D.C.-based nonprofit organization focused on global biological threat reduction.
Chinese officials and scientists have strenuously denied any connection between the coronavirus outbreak and its showcase research center, which includes a high-security facility known as the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Wuhan team leader, renowned virologist Shi Zhengli, contends that the institute never possessed the SARS-cov-2 virus that triggered the pandemic and has infected more than 3 million people worldwide. In a social media post, Shi said she would “bet my life” that the outbreak had “nothing to do with the lab.”
At the same time, scrutiny of the lab’s research has underscored what biosecurity experts say are significant risks inherent in the kinds of research the Chinese scientists were conducting. Academic studies examined by The Washington Post document scores of encounters with animals that are known hosts to deadly viruses, including strains closely related to the pathogen behind the coronavirus pandemic. While the scientists wore gloves and masks and took other protective measures, U.S. experts who reviewed the experiments say the precautions would not necessarily protect the researchers from harmful exposures, in caves or in the lab.
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