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Washington: Three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology sought hospital care in November 2019. This came weeks before Beijing disclosed the Covid-19 pandemic, a US media report said. The report cited a previously undisclosed American intelligence document. This new finding could add weight to growing calls for a full scale probe of whether the coronavirus may have escaped from China’s top bio lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The details of the reporting go beyond a State Department fact sheet, issued during the final days of the Trump administration. It said that several researchers at the Wuhan lab, a center for the study of coronaviruses and other pathogens, became sick in autumn 2019 ‘with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness’, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The origins of the Covid-19 remain a widely debated topic. Some scientists and politicians have said that the possibility of a lab leak of the deadly virus exists. The Wuhan Institute of Virology is near the outbreak’s known epicentre of Huanan Seafood Market in central China’s Wuhan city. It is this place where the virus first emerged in late 2019 and became a pandemic.
Former US president Donald Trump was among those who supported the theory that the virus might have escaped from a bio lab in China. “Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care,” the newspaper said.
The paper said that current and former officials familiar with the intelligence about the lab researchers expressed differing views about the strength of the supporting evidence, with one person saying it was provided by an international partner and was potentially significant but still in need of further investigation and additional corroboration.
Another person described intelligence as stronger. “The information that we had coming from the various sources was of exquisite quality. It was very precise. What it didn’t tell you was exactly why they got sick,” he said, referring to the researchers.
In a detailed article titled ‘The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan’ published in the prestigious ‘Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ early this month, noted British science writer, editor and author Nicholas Wade raised several questions on the origin of the novel coronavirus. It has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year and caused over three million deaths and wrecked global economies.
The evidence adds up to a serious case that the SARS2 virus could have been created in a lab, from which it then escaped, wrote Wade, who refers to SARS-CoV-2 virus as SARS2 in short.
In May 2020, the World Health Assembly requested that the World Health Organisation (WHO) director-general work with partners to determine the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
A team of WHO experts, which probed the origin of the coronavirus, concluded in March that ‘all hypotheses’ included the allegation that Covid-19 could have emanated from a bio lab ‘remained open’.
WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, while receiving the report of the international experts’ team which visited Wuhan, said March 30 that ‘as far as the WHO is concerned, all hypotheses remain on the table’.
“This report is a very important beginning, but it is not the end. We have not yet found the source of the virus, and we must continue to follow the science and leave no stone unturned as we do,” Ghebreyesus said.
China has called for expanding the search for the origins of the coronavirus in other countries, mainly America, sidestepping the WHO chief’s assertion that further probe is required on allegations that the deadly virus may have leaked from the bio-lab in Wuhan.