TOP SCIENTISTS CONDEMN WUHAN PROBE AS CHARADE
We unearth plans to breed bats for virus experiments – despite denials by British scientist on the WHO team ‘investigating’ the origins of Covid
THE Chinese laboratory at the centre of suspicion over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic was awarded a patent for cages to hold live bats for testing just months before the virus started spreading.
The revelation comes after the World Health Organisation last week backed Beijing’s line, saying that a leak from the institute was ‘highly unlikely’, while giving credence to theories that the virus had entered the country via frozen meat.
The team included Peter Daszak, a British- born zoologist whose organisation EcoHealth Alliance has studied bat-borne viruses with Wuhan lab scientists for 15 years, and who has categorically denied that researchers keep the mammals for testing.
However, The Mail on Sunday has established that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) filed an application in June 2018 to patent ‘bat rearing cages’ which would be ‘capable of healthy growth and breeding under artificial conditions’.
The patent, which has been seen by this newspaper, was granted in January 2019 – 11 months before Beijing reported that the first cases of the virus in the city had broken out just a few miles from the institute.
A separate patent, filed by the i nstitute on October 16, 2020, relates to the ‘artificial breeding method of wild bat’.
The patent discusses crossspecies transmission of SARSCoV from bat t o humans and
‘We need China to come clean and tell the truth’
other animals, saying :‘ Bats infected with the virus naturally or artificially have no obvious clinical symptoms, and the mechanism is unknown’.
It explicitly states that the method is for breeding bats for scientific experiments: ‘The invention aims to provide an artificial breeding method of wild bat predators, which aims at overcoming the defects in the prior art, and the wild bat predators are artificially domesticated, bred and passaged to establish an artificial breeding group, thereby providing a brandnew model experimental animal for scientific research.’
Responding to a question over whether researchers were keeping live bats, Mr Daszak tweeted in April last year: ‘The researchers don’t keep the bats, nor do they kill them.
‘All bats are released back to their cave site after sampling. It’s a conservation measure and is much safer in terms of disease spread than killing them or trying to keep them in a lab.’
And in December he appeared to repeat the claim by stating the labs he had worked with for 15 years – such as the one in Wuhan – ‘DO NOT have live or dead bats in them. There is no evidence anywhere that this happened’. The cloak of secrecy with which the Chinese government has enveloped the institute makes it hard to establish the extent to which the patents were translated into practice, but an online biography of the lab’s work also states that researchers have the capacity to keep 12 bat cages, along with 12 ferret cages.
Last week, Mr Daszak, who has faced fierce criticism over his research and funding connections to the Wuhan lab, also took aim at US intelligence which has pointed to a lab leak being the ‘most credible’ source of the virus, in the words of the US State Department.
Mr Daszak was part of the investigating WHO team which swung its weight behind the Chinese government’s attempts to dent any responsibility for the spread of the virus. Their findings were based on interviews with staff at the WIV, which has strong links to the Chinese army.
This newspaper revealed last year that the WHO had allowed China to vet scientists taking part in the probe, while also appointing Mr Daszak to its ten-strong team – despite the British charity chief’s funding for research on bat viruses at the Wuhan laboratory having been previously stopped on safety grounds.
The bat cage patent contains extensive details of the feeding, drinking and breeding conditions, saying the animals are ‘captured as needed, and... freed after taking [the] required sample or temporarily raised [for] a period of time’.
And in November 2019, at a time when US intelligence points to a potential Covid-19 outbreak at the lab, the Wuhan lab filed a patent for a device to treat injuries sustained while working with pathogenic viruses in a biosafety lab.
Researchers who filed the patent have worked at the WIV for more than a decade, including one scientist who was involved in studying coronaviruses in bats. The special
ist tourniquet device, designed to wrap around the finger of someone who bleeds in a virology lab accident, appears to be the only one of several hundred publicly available patents which relates to the treatment of injuries.
Charles Small, an open- source intelligence consultant who has studied the origins of the virus and discovered the patents, said: ‘The WIV describe catching wild bats in mountain caves and breeding them in their patented cages to use as animal models in scientific experiments. They mention infecting bats with viruses artificially.
‘The WIV’s patented method of handling bats known to carry SARS-related coronaviruses daily at feeding time risks coronavirus spillover.
‘ The WIV have also declared cages of ferrets and rabbits.
‘The WHO should provide a full account of the WIV’s bat and bat coronavirus experiments.’ Alan Mendoza, executive director of the Henry Jackson Society think-tank, said: ‘As this pandemic wears on, and more and more people tragically lose their lives, the questions continue to mount for China and the research carried out at its Wuhan Institute of Virology.
‘It’s becoming increasingly clear that the WHO’s investigation was not fit for purpose and what we need is the Chinese Communist Party to come clean and tell us the truth about Covid-19’s origins.’
Mr Daszak declined to comment yesterday.
The Chinese Embassy did not respond to requests for comment.