UK zoologist dismisses Covid lab-leak theory

President of company tied to Wuhan research says no similar coronavirus existed before pandemic outbreak ‘There is no evidence that any lab in the world had a virus genetically close enough that it could be manipulated to become that’ ‘Research at WIV onl

NO LABORATORY in the world held a virus close enough to Covid-19 for it to be manipulated to create the pandemic strain, according to a British zoologist whose company had funded Wuhan researchers.

Peter Daszak, the president of Ecohealth Alliance, was responding to claims that scientists had dismissed the laboratory leak theory because they did not want to stop doing dangerous “gain of function” experiments to increase the infectivity of viruses.

The pandemic began close to where scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been importing bat coronaviruses for experimentation.

Last week, Anton van der Merwe, a professor of molecular immunology at Oxford University, warned that scientists in the field were worried that a ban would be reimposed on testing. However, in a letter to The Daily Telegraph refuting that claim, Mr Daszak, said: “He (Prof Van der Merwe) states that these experiments were being performed in Wuhan on Sars-cov-2 like viruses.

“This is incorrect. Experiments at WIV involved bat coronaviruses related to the original Sars-cov, not SARSCOV-2, and there is no evidence that any lab in the world had a virus genetically close enough to Sars-cov-2 that it could be manipulated to become that virus.”

However, critics pointed out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology has admitted housing a bat coronavirus called RATG13, which had 96.9 per cent similarity to Covid-19. Viscount Ridley, coauthor of Viral: the search for the origin

of Covid-19, said that it would only need the addition of a new spike protein, a few gene changes and the inclusion of a “furin cleavage site” to raise infectivity and lab evolution to create the virus.

He said: “RATG13 is not the ancestor, but it is a close cousin.”

In reply, Mr Daszak, said: “There’s really no way RATG13 could have anything to do with Sars-cov-2 – the spike protein and the backbone sequence of the virus are too genetically distinct to make it possible that this virus could have evolved into Sars-cov-2 or be manipulated to become Sars-cov-2.”

Other experts said Covid-19 could also be a consensus sequence – essentially a mish-mash of other viruses.

In a leaked grant proposal made by Ecohealth Alliance and WIV in 2018, researchers had proposed synthesising viral genomes to make a consensus sequence based on viruses that were 95 per cent identical to each other.

The proposal which was rejected by Darpa, the US military research agency, because it “could have put local communities at risk”. It also suggested the insertion of human-specific furin cleavage sites into Sars-like coronaviruses – could have made them very infectious for humans.

Dr Monali Rahalkar, a scientist in microbiology at the Agharkar Research Institute in India, said the changes would have been possible with the viruses available.

She said: “A consensus sequence can be created if they have similar viruses or using other bioinformatics tools.”

In his letter, Mr Daszak claimed that the experiments carried out by WIV would not count as “gain of function” because the bat viruses involved had never infected humans.

“The research conducted at WIV only dealt with bat coronaviruses that had never been shown to infect people, let alone cause morbidity and/or mortality in humans,” he said.

He added: “Prof Van der Merwe also suggests that it is unlikely that identifying potentially dangerous organisms in the wild will help prevent pandemics. Surely those risks justify undertaking the kind of research that was supported by the US.”

However Prof Van der Merwe described Mr Daszak’s response as “petty” and a clear conflict of interest.

Mr Daszak was instrumental in organising a letter published in The Lancet early in the pandemic that effectively shut down scientific debate into whether coronavirus was manipulated or leaked from the lab.

Emails have emerged showing that Mr Daszak chose not to sign the letter so that it did not link back to the collaboration of scientists involved.