‘Covid-19 cannot be man-made’
Wu called on the World Health Organization and international scientists to seek truth with the spirit of science
BEIJING, China (Global Times) — Even as scientists from the world have been calling for a stop to politicizing the probe on the Covid-19 origins, some countries, especially the US, continue to hype the "lab leak" theory and exert pressure on the World Health Organization (WHO) for a second round of investigations in China. In an exclusive interview, China's renowned scientist in evolutionary biology and genetics Wu Chung-I said that the virus can only come from nature and cannot be man-made, by using classical evolutionary theory.
Wu, a professor from the School of Life Sciences at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, South China's Guangdong Province and director of the Beijing Institute of Genomics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, stressed the main reason why the global epidemic is out of control is that the voices of scientists are too weak; otherwise, the global response had been scientific and positive and the Covid-19 outbreak would have ended in May last year.
China will not accept the WHO's proposal on a second phase study on Covid-19 origins in China.
Describing the world as "irrational," Wu called on the WHO and international scientists to seek truth with the spirit of science.
On Thursday, Chinese health officials said at a press conference that China will not accept the WHO's proposal on a second phase study on Covid-19 origins in China, saying that the proposal lacks respect to common sense and arrogant to science. They stressed that the next stage study should be carried out in more countries and places around the world on the basis of wide consultations among member states, not in places that have already been inspected.
Yuan Zhiming, director of China's National Biosafety Laboratory and professor at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, also slammed the "lab leak" theory at the conference, stressing that the institute has never "contacted, preserved, designed, made or leaked the coronavirus."
Such a firm, specific response from China came after the US kept throwing mud at China by hyping the "lab leak" theory and US President Joe Biden even demanded US intelligence agencies confirm in 90 days if the coronavirus emerged from a laboratory, despite the WHO-China joint report on the probe of virus origins has declared that a laboratory origin of the pandemic was considered to be "extremely unlikely" as the three labs in Wuhan working with either CoVs diagnostics and/or CoVs isolation and vaccine development all had high quality biosafety level facilities that were well-managed.