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发帖数: 56 | 1 More than 900 pages of materials related to US.-funded coronavirus research
in China were released following a FOIA lawsuit by The Intercept.
NEWLY RELEASED DOCUMENTS provide details of U.S.-funded research on several
types of coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
“This is a road map to the high-risk research that could have led to the
current pandemic,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of U.S. Right To
Know, a group that has been investigating the origins of Covid-19.
One of the grants, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus
Emergence,” outlines an ambitious effort led by EcoHealth Alliance
President Peter Daszak to screen thousands of bat samples for novel
coronaviruses. The research also involved screening people who work with
live animals. The documents contain several critical details about the
research in Wuhan, including the fact that key experimental work with
humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University
Center for Animal Experiment — and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
as was previously assumed. The documents raise additional questions about
the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident, an idea that
Daszak has aggressively dismissed.
The bat coronavirus grant provided EcoHealth Alliance with a total of $3.1
million, including $599,000 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology used in
part to identify and alter bat coronaviruses likely to infect humans. Even
before the pandemic, many scientists were concerned about the potential
dangers associated with such experiments. The grant proposal acknowledges
some of those dangers: “Fieldwork involves the highest risk of exposure to
SARS or other CoVs, while working in caves with high bat density overhead
and the potential for fecal dust to be inhaled.”
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said the documents
show that EcoHealth Alliance has reason to take the lab-leak theory
seriously. “In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how
risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting
bitten — and they kept records of everyone who got bitten,” Chan said. “
Does EcoHealth have those records? And if not, how can they possibly rule
out a research-related accident?”
According to Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University,
the documents contain critical information about the research done in Wuhan,
including about the creation of novel viruses. “The viruses they
constructed were tested for their ability to infect mice that were
engineered to display human type receptors on their cell,” Ebright wrote to
The Intercept after reviewing the documents. Ebright also said the
documents make it clear that two different types of novel coronaviruses were
able to infect humanized mice. “While they were working on SARS-related
coronavirus, they were carrying out a parallel project at the same time on
MERS-related coronavirus,” Ebright said, referring to the virus that causes
Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/06/new-details-emerge-about-coronavirus-
research-at-chinese-lab/ |
