Lab bans ‘bat’ web searches

ONE of the Wuhan institutes at the centre of international speculation over the source of the Covid epidemic has banned internet browsers from searching for the word ‘bats’ on its website.

If the Chinese word for the animals which incubated the virus is typed into the search engine of the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, the site blocks it, saying: ‘A banned label has been inserted.’

The MoS has also discovered that over the past month, the city’s Institute of Virology has removed from its website a total of 41 different articles about experiments on bats and other issues on the study of viruses.