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The coronavirus, the Chinese lab and the attempts to connect the two
- Unsubstantiated theories linking the new pathogen to a Wuhan virus institute keep coming back to life despite debunking from mainstream science
- The laboratory contributed to the genome sequencing and identification of the virus in January
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US President Donald Trump has declared that his administration will investigate whether the pandemic coronavirus that has killed more than 170,000 people around the world came from a virus research laboratory in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the pathogen was first detected.
The announcement on Friday has given new life to unsupported theories that the virus was engineered in the lab, despite repeated denials from the facility and debunking of the suggestions by the mainstream scientific community.
The facility at the centre of the rumours is the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, China’s only top-level biosafety facility, run by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
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The lab contributed to the genome sequencing and identification of the virus in January, and its database, coordinated by leading virologist Shi Zhengli, helped to quickly link the new coronavirus to a bat virus collected from Yunnan province. The two viruses have about 96 per cent of their genetic material in common.
In the early days of the outbreak, many of the patients were linked to a wet market in central Wuhan, raising the hypothesis that some species of wild animal, perhaps a pangolin, sold at the market was an intermediate host through which a bat-borne virus made the critical evolution and jumped to humans.
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