Chinese scientists were working closely with the country’s military just weeks before the outbreak of the pandemic in a bid to create a mutant virus capable of being used as a biological weapon, US investigators have claimed.
The origins of COVID-19 remain a mystery, with one Chinese scientist recently admitting the theory that it “leaked” out of a laboratory could not be discounted.
Now a new in-depth probe has offered a detailed picture of what happened inside the secretive Wuhan Institute of Virology in the final months of 2019.
The first fatalities were not reported to the World Health Organisation (WHO) until the end of the year, with a press release issued at the start of 2020 warning of an unspecified lung disease.
The first cases of what was eventually named COVID-19 were traced to a seafood market in the city of Wuhan – but there is no proof that that is where the virus crossed over into the human population.
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The institute is known to have been undertaking increasingly dangerous experiments on coronaviruses gathered from bat caves in southern China, initially making its findings public.
However, this all stopped after a strain was found in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province which had claimed several lives.
As happened later, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities, and the viruses found in the cave are now recognised as the only members of COVID-19’s immediate family to have existed before the pandemic.
They were subsequently transported to the institute, with scientists working on them in secrecy.
One US investigator told The Sunday Times: “The trail of papers starts to go dark. That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off.
“My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to the army’s pursuit of dual-use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”
The programme was specifically intended to repurpose the mineshaft viruses to make them more infectious to humans, the US team believes, with it subsequently escaping into Wuhan via a laboratory accident.
Another investigator claimed: “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The team cited evidence that researchers working on the experiments were taken to hospital with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019 – more than a month before the first cases were reported to the West.
Another investigator said: “We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory.
“They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
Speaking last month Professor George Gao, former head of China’s Centre for Disease Control (CDC), said the lab leak theory could not be discounted.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4, Prof Gao, now president of China’s International Institute of Vaccine Innovation, said: “You can always suspect anything.
“That’s science. Don’t rule out anything.”
He also acknowledged the Chinese government had organised an investigation to establish Covid’s origins – while stressing it had not involved his own department.
He added: “I think their conclusion is that they are following all the protocols. They haven’t found any wrongdoing.”
