SCMP | A Chinese research institute in the city of Wuhan – ground zero of the coronavirus outbreak
– has again dismissed rumours suggesting it is linked to the public
health crisis, saying it has been “badly hurt” by conspiracy theories
circulating online.
“The
rumours … have caused severe damage to our researchers who have been
dedicated to working on the front line, and seriously interrupted the
emergency research we are doing during the epidemic,” the Wuhan
Institute of Virology (WIV), which is affiliated with the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, said in a statement.
Those
rumours included that the new virus strain was “man-made”, “leaked from
the WIV lab”, that “the WIV was taken over by the military”, “a WIV
researcher died from the leaked virus”, “a WIV student is patient zero”,
and “a WIV researcher reported to authorities that the WIV chief was
responsible” for the epidemic, the statement posted on its website on
Wednesday said.
The institute runs the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, the only
facility in China equipped to diagnose and research easily transmitted
pathogens at the highest biosafety level of four.
“Looking back on our hard work over the past month, we have nothing to be ashamed of or to regret,” the statement said.
A prominent virologist with the institute has also been targeted by the rumours. Shi Zhengli’s exploration of caves in Yunnan province discovered that another deadly coronavirus – which caused the severe
acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars, epidemic in 2002-03 – had
originated in bats. Her database of viruses found in bats provided
evidence for the theory that the coronavirus at the centre of the
ongoing epidemic was also linked to bats. The new virus strain was found
to be 96 per cent identical to one found in bats.
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I'm not a virologist and don't pretend to be. But I can read a fugging manual with the best of them, and understand what I've read. That said, slowly reread the nature paper from 2015 yourself.
Therefore, to examine the emergence potential (that is, the potential to infect humans) of circulating bat CoVs, we built a chimeric virus encoding a novel, zoonotic CoV spike protein—from the RsSHC014-CoV sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats1—in the context of the SARS-CoV mouse-adapted backbone. The hybrid virus allowed us to evaluate the ability of the novel spike protein to cause disease independently of other necessary adaptive mutations in its natural backbone. Using this approach, we characterized CoV infection mediated by the SHC014 spike protein in primary human airway cells and in vivo, and tested the efficacy of available immune therapeutics against SHC014-CoV. Together, the strategy translates metagenomics data to help predict and prepare for future emergent viruses.
