US laboratory may have been involved in emergence of Covid, claim professors

EXPERIMENTS carried out in the US may have contributed to the emergence of Covid-19, Prof Jeffrey Sachs, a leading economist, has claimed, as he called for an independent inquiry into whether the virus leaked from a laboratory.

Prof Sachs, who has twice been named in Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, said universities and research institutions should open their databases for scrutiny, amid fears labs were genetically modifying viruses.

Covid-19 began spreading in a wet market that was eight miles from the Wuhan Institute of Virology – and writing in PNAS, a peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences, Prof Sachs said it was clear that scientists from the University of North Carolina and New York-based Ecohealth Alliance had been working with the institute to manipulate viruses.

“Research proposals make clear that the collaboration was involved in the collection of a large number of so-far undocumented Sars-like viruses and was engaged in their manipulation … raising concerns that an airborne virus might have infected a laboratory worker,” he said in a joint article with Prof Neil Harrison, of Columbia University.

The authors said that before the pandemic, work on Sars-like coronaviruses was being carried out as part of a “highly collaborative Us–china scientific research programme” funded by the US government, via the National Institutes of Health.

The project, known as Predict, sought to identify viruses that had the potential to leap from animals to humans. Researchers collected bat coronaviruses from China and south-east Asia that were sent to various labs for “sequencing”, “archiving”, “analysis” and “manipulation”.

China has revealed little about the work that was taking place and removed a database of viral sequences shortly before the pandemic erupted.

But experiments were also taking place in the US that have never been shared for independent analysis, the authors argue.

“The precise nature of the experiments that were conducted… remains unknown,” wrote Profs Sachs and Harrison, who also point out that the same group of Chinese and US scientists had submitted proposals to insert a specialist feature into Sars-like viruses called the furin cleavage site.

Covid-19 is unique in having a furin cleavage site, which makes the virus so infectious to humans. No other coronaviruses have the feature, and some scientists believe it is evidence the virus was man made. Others think it evolved naturally.

‘They were involved in the collection of a large number of so-far undocumented Sars-like viruses’