A top Chinese official who led Beijing’s response to COVID-19 admits he cannot rule out that the deadly virus leaked from a laboratory.
“You possibly can at all times suspect something. That is science,” Dr. George Fu Gao, who was the Chinese equivalent of Dr. Anthony Fauci, he told the BBC when asked about an ongoing theory about scientists in his own country.
“Don’t rule anything out,” he told the “Fever: The Hunt for Covid’s Origin” podcast.
The worldwide pandemic has killed 7 million people worldwide, based on the World Health Organization.
The scientist’s admission, regardless of how vague, is staggering given how vehemently Beijing has at all times denied the possibility that scientists at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology could have uncovered the virus while working on similar bat diseases.
At the time, China called it “a lie created by anti-China forces”, even blaming the US for its origin.
Actually, the Chinese Communist Party took this theory seriously, Gao admitted for the first time.
He said “the government has organized something” to analyze. “This lab has been double-checked by experts in the field.”
Gao, who was the head of China’s Center for Disease Control, could only say that he “heard” that the lab had received the clear, without revealing how sure he was of it.
“I believe their conclusion is that they follow all protocols. They didn’t find it [any] offense, he suggested.
The lab leak theory got here about shortly after the novel coronavirus emerged in late 2019 in Wuhan, a Chinese city that’s the center of research into nearly an identical diseases.
The lab’s chief researcher Shi Zhengli – nicknamed “bat woman” – “lost sleep for a day or two” when the mysterious, deadly disease first swept Wuhan, his associate Wang Linfa told the BBC.
She was concerned that there could have been a sample in her lab that she didn’t learn about, however it contained a virus, had contaminated something, and leaked out, Wang said.
Nonetheless, Shi says she has ruled out those concerns and that there may be “zero likelihood” of hiding it, Wang said in a podcast.
Despite this, the theory stays the best known of US intelligence theories.
In February, FBI Director Christopher Wray confirmed that the office “has been assessing for a very long time that the source of the pandemic is more than likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”
Last month, former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe called it “the only explanation credibly supported by our intelligence, science and customary sense.”
In accordance with the WHO, there have been over 766 million cases of COVID-19 worldwide.