Multiple Western leaders and officials, including Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, have cast doubt on the theory that the COVID-19 virus originated in a lab. There is already wide scientific consensus that the virus was not manmade or genetically modified. The followings are what some of them have said about the claim of China lab virus leak, according to Editor’s note published by China Daily:
“We have looked into this. We don’t have any evidence…There isn’t any evidence this is a man-made coronavirus…We haven’t seen any evidence,” UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock said during a TV interview with Sky News.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has distanced Australia from Donald Trump’s allegation that the coronavirus outbreak began in a Wuhan laboratory.
“What we have before us doesn’t suggest that [the Wuhan lab] is the likely source. There is nothing that we have that indicates that is the likely source,” he said.
France said there was no evidence so far of a link between the new coronavirus and the work of the P4 research laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
“We would like to make it clear that there is to this day no factual evidence corroborating the information recently circulating in the United States press that establishes a link between the origins of COVID-19 and the work of the P4 laboratory of Wuhan, China,” an official at President Emmanuel Macron’s office said.
Canadain Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada is not drawing “firm conclusions” on allegations that the novel coronavirus — which has now caused devastation worldwide — came from a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Speaking to reporters, Trudeau said Canada has been working with its Five Eyes partners — Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States — on “various” pieces of intelligence regarding the COVID-19 outbreak but “at this point we are not drawing any firm conclusions.”
“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats, and what’s out there now is very, very strongly leaning toward this [virus] could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated— the way the mutations have naturally evolved,”
Dr Anthony Fauci, the US’s top infectious disease expert and a member of the White House coronavirus task force dismissed theories that the coronavirus was either manufactured or accidentally released from a Chinese lab.
“We listened again and again to numerous scientists who looked at the sequences and looked at this virus. And we are assured that this virus is natural in origin,” said Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, during a virtual news conference.
Ryan emphasized the importance of better understanding the virus and understanding the animal-human interface and how the barrier between them was breached.
“The purpose of understanding that is that we can put in place the necessary prevention and public health measures to prevent that happening again anywhere,” he said.
Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said that “we don’t know” where the coronavirus originated.
“Did it come out of the virology lab in Wuhan, did it occur in the wet market there in Wuhan or did it occur somewhere else? And the answer to that is we don’t know,” the top US military officer told reporters in a Pentagon briefing when asked about the origin of COVID-19.
“Various agencies both civilian and US government are looking at that,” he added.
Milley said that the weight of evidence indicated the coronavirus was “natural and not manmade” and was “probably not intentional.”
US President Donald Trump, file photo. [Photo/Agencies]
US Congresswoman Judy Chu accused Trump of blaming China for the pandemic as a strategy to deflect criticism from his administration’s handling of the outbreak in the US, which now has more COVID-19 cases than any other country in the world.
“It’s clear that President Trump is trying to continue to use this anti-China focus (for) his election campaign,” Chu said during a webinar. “Right now, this president is actually trying to get votes by being anti-Chinese. He thinks that’s the best way for him to stay in office.”
Wilson Center disinformation researcher Nina Jankowicz said that putting the blame on a Wuhan lab helps the Trump administration find a scapegoat.
It becomes more politically convenient for Trump and his administration, she said.
Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, commented on Twitter about how the Trump administration has groped to find a direct link between the coronavirus and Chinese labs.
Konyndyk is also critical of the Washington Post’s Rogin for publishing excerpts of a two-year-old cable, rather than the cable in its entirety.
“It’s irresponsible for political reporters like Rogin [to] uncritically regurgitate a secret ‘cable’ without asking a single virologist or ecologist or making any attempt to understand the scientific context,” tweeted Columbia University virologist Angela Rasmussen.
Vincent Racaniello, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Columbia University, said that there was no way this could escape a lab and if this escaped a Wuhan lab, [the researchers] would have all gotten sick.
Racaniello said the two claims — that the virus could be human-made and that it could have escaped from a laboratory — had no scientific backing. “No human could ever design this virus.”
“Everything I have heard in my 15 years of work with people in that lab has been absolutely normal with what you’d expect from virology labs,” said zoologist Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, responding to the rumor that the virus might have come from a lab in Wuhan.
During an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS on Sunday, Daszak also clarified that most pandemics originate in animals, usually wildlife, often bats.
“Nobody has the virus from bats that led to COVID-19,” said Daszak. “We’ve not found it yet. We’ve found close relatives, but it’s not the same virus. So, to my mind, it’s not a possibility.”
Researchers in the US, UK and Australia published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine in mid-March that concluded: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
The odds were extremely high against a lab release as opposed to a natural event, said Kristian Andersen, the lead author of the paper and a specialist in infectious diseases at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California, The New York Times reported.
Jonna Mazet, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis, who has worked with and trained researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the past, said a lab accident was “highly unlikely”.
