Scientist wants apology from Trump over virus

THE deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli, said US President Donald Trump owes her country an apology as she again denied assertions that Covid-19 was linked to the Wuhan lab where she works.

Shi said in a recent interview published in Science magazine that she and her colleagues encountered the virus in December last year, when reports of the disease first emerged in the city. She said the lab hadn’t seen or studied the virus before that.

“US President Trump’s claim that Sars-CoV-2 leaked from our institute totally contradicts the facts,” Shi said in the article. “It jeopardises and affects our academic work and personal life. He owes us an apology.”

The question of the Covid-19’s origin has become an increasingly politicised issue as relations between the US and China deteriorate. Trump, who has repeatedly referred to covid-19 as the “China virus”, and US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo have suggested a link between the Wuhan lab and the outbreak, although no evidence has ever been presented publicly. The World Health Organization is sending a team of researchers to China to study the virus’s animal origins.

While Shi, who is renowned for her work on Covid-19 in bats, has previously dismissed any link between the virus and the lab, her comments in the interview provided the most detailed rebuttal yet:

● WIV had identified hundreds of bat viruses, but never anything close to Sars-CoV-2, Shi said.

● Questions had been raised about a possible link with RaTG13, a bat virus similar to Sars-CoV-2. Shi said the lab didn't culture that bat virus, making an accident unlikely.

● Shi said differences in the sequences of the two viruses suggested they diverged from a common ancestor 20 to 70 years ago.

● Shi’s partial genome sequencing in 2016 of a coronavirus she called 4991 led to suspicions it was SarsCoV-2. But Shi said 4991 was actually RaTG13: 4991 was named for the bat, and was switched to RaTG13 after the entire virus was sequenced.

● The Wuhan lab was subject to inspections, and antibody tests had shown no infections among staff. Shi said the lab had never been ordered to destroy any samples after the pathogen emerged.

● Shi said Covid-19 probably originated in bats and jumped to humans either directly or through an intermediate host.

● The lab found RNA fragments from the virus in various places in the Wuhan seafood market, but not in frozen animal meat. Shi said years of surveillance in Hubei province hadn't turned up bat coronaviruses close to Sars-CoV-2, leading her to believe the jump from animals to humans happened elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Trump is back to pushing unproven claims that an anti-malaria drug is an effective treatment and challenging the credibility of the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci.

Fauci hit back testerday, saying he would keep doing his job. Numerous studies have shown that the drug hydroxychloroquine is not an effective treatment for Covid-19. And the US Food and Drug Administration recently withdrew an order that allowed the drug’s use as a emergency treatment for Covid-19.