Sharing renewed concerns over virus origin, American diplomatic sources said that the world is “one wet market or bio lab away from the next spillover”, reported The Sunday Times…reports Asian Lite News.
British intelligence officials believe it is “feasible” that the pandemic began after the Covid-19 virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, it was reported.
According to a Sunday Times report, British spies are now investigating the theory of a possible leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Quoting sources familiar with the development, the British daily said that a recent reassessment of the possible source of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) has prompted UK intelligence to investigate the lab leak theory.
Sharing renewed concerns over virus origin, American diplomatic sources said that the world is “one wet market or bio lab away from the next spillover”, reported The Sunday Times.
Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Saturday said that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was engaged in military activity alongside its civilian research — amid renewed scrutiny of the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic emerged from the secretive lab.
“What I can say for sure is this: we know that they were engaged in efforts connected to the People’s Liberation Army inside of that laboratory, so military activity being performed alongside what they claimed was just good old civilian research,” Pompeo said, as per Fox News.
He further mentioned: “They refuse to tell us what it was, they refuse to describe the nature of either of those, they refused to allow access to the World Health Organisation when it tried to get in there.”
China is coming under increasing pressure over probe into the origins of the COVID-19, even as scientists are demanding more clarity to go into the roots of the global pandemic.
Meanwhile, according to a latest breakthrough research conducted by a team of researchers, the coronavirus disease did not develop naturally, but was created by Chinese scientists in a Wuhan lab, who then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.
The research, conducted by British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Birger Sorensen, is forthcoming in the scientific journal Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, the DailyMail.com reported on Friday.
In the 22-page paper, the researchers describe their months-long “forensic analysis” into experiments done at the Wuhan lab between 2002 and 2019.
It concludes that “SARS-Coronavirus-2 has no credible natural ancestor” and that it is “beyond reasonable doubt” that the virus was created through “laboratory manipulation”.
The paper also alleges of “unique fingerprints” in Covid samples that could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory and that “the likelihood of it being the result of natural processes is very small”.
“A natural virus pandemic would be expected to mutate gradually and become more infectious but less pathogenic which is what many expected with the Covid-19 pandemic but which does not appear to have happened,” the scientists wrote in the paper, according to the Daily Mail report.
“The implication of our historical reconstruction, we posit now beyond reasonable doubt, of the purposively manipulated chimeric virus SARS-CoV-2 makes it imperative to reconsider what types of Gain of Function experiments it is morally acceptable to undertake. Because of the wide social impact, these decisions cannot be left to research scientists alone,” they added.
Dalgleish and Sorensen wrote that they have had “prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China” for a year, but their theory was rejected by academics and major journals, the report said.
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