Brian Ross wrote on Jun 16
th, 2021 at 4:36pm:
Chinese authorities have vehemently denied the possibility of a lab leak since the beginning of the pandemic, with top diplomat Yang Jiechi as recently as last week accusing the US of spreading an "absurd story".
"We urge the United States to respect facts and science, refrain from politicising the issue ... and focus on international cooperation in the fight against the pandemic," Mr Yang said.
"Chinese authorities have vehemently denied" - so it's true, then.
As G7 countries increase calls for a “phase two” investigation into the origins of Covid-19, new footage has revealed that live bats were kept in cages inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology – despite claims from the World Health Organisation (WHO) that such a possibility was a “conspiracy”.
The infamous lab is at the centre of a theory – first spruiked by the likes of Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo – that Covid-19 wasn’t, as many scientists believe, transmitted from bats to people via an unknown intermediary, but was instead leaked, intentionally or not, from the institute.
A joint WHO/China investigation into the origins of the disease first worked to dispel this line of thinking, calling the chance of a laboratory leak “extremely unlikely” and the idea that bats were held at the institute “an error”.
“No BATS were sent to Wuhan lab for genetic analysis of viruses collected in the field. That’s not how this science works. We collect bat samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we catch them,” a member of the WHO team, zoologist Dr Peter Daszak, wrote in a December tweet.
“This is a widely circulated conspiracy theory. This piece describes work I’m the lead on and labs I’ve collaborated with for 15 years,” he wrote in another.
“They DO NOT have live or dead bats in them. There is no evidence anywhere that this happened. It’s an error I hope will be corrected.”
But an official May 2017 video from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, obtained by Sky News, shows bats held in a cage at the institute four years ago and a scientist feeding a worm to one of the creatures.