Covid COULD have leaked from a lab... but in the US, suggests report in Lancet
A REPORT into Covid-19 has triggered controversy by suggesting the virus may have leaked out of a US lab.
The commissioned report in the top medical journal The Lancet said there were two possibilities for the outbreak: Through a ‘natural spillover event’ – where a virus jumps from animals to humans – or from ‘research-related activities’.
It then pointed to the possibility of US involvement by saying that ‘independent researchers have not yet investigated the US laboratories engaged in the manipulation of Sars-CoV-like viruses’.
However, it added ‘nor have they investigated the details of the laboratory research that had been under way in Wuhan’. The Chinese city of Wuhan was at the epicentre of the outbreak and the theories that the virus leaked there.
But now experts have criticised the report for suggesting the US may have been involved.
Professor David Robertson, director of the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Virus Research, said that while there were still answers needed on Covid’s emergence, there was zero basis for US involvement. He added: ‘It’s true we’ve details to understand on the side of natural origins, for example, the exact intermediate species involved, but that doesn’t mean there’s… any basis to the wild speculation that US labs were involved.’
The 58-page report, led by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, of Columbia University in New York, and published last week, marks something of U-turn by The Lancet.
Soon after the virus emerged, it published a note by 27 experts attacking ‘conspiracy theories that suggested Covid-19 does not have a natural origin’. The letter helped to silence critics that believed potentially lax controls in a Chinese lab could have led to the outbreak.
But the note came under fire after it emerged it was drafted by British scientist Peter Daszak, who worked closely with the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology. The laboratory’s close location to the first reports of the virus and the fact it was researching bat coronaviruses have made it a leading suspect in theories.
According to Ian Birrell, writing in The Mail on Sunday: ‘As one respected scientist told me, perhaps the Chinese government is looking for a path to admit to a lab accident while sharing blame with the US.’