Covid-19 did escape from a Wuhan lab, study says

Just in case you were still in some doubt, the Covid-19 pandemic did start from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, a major review has concluded.

Anton van der Merwe, a researcher from Oxford University, has said that the lab leak is by far the most likely source of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

In the years leading up to 2019, when Covid-19 was first identified, scientists at Wuhan had been experimenting with many different bat viruses.  They “created genetically modified versions of viruses and tested them by infecting human cells and humanised mice, causing significant gains in infectivity and lethality in one known case. They did some of these experiments at inappropriately low safety levels”, he writes in a paper co-authored with Matt Ridley, from the Prosperity Institute.

“Around the time the Covid outbreak began, Wuhan closed its database and withheld key information about virus sequences and experiments. These facts amount to a strong though circumstantial case for suspecting that a laboratory leak started the pandemic,” they conclude.

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