China’s “bat woman” has lashed out at US President Donald Trump, saying the he owes her country an apology as she again denied assertions that the novel coronavirus is linked to the lab where she works.
Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) Deputy Director Shi Zhengli (石正麗) said in an interview published in Science magazine that she and her colleagues encountered the virus in December last year, when reports of the disease first emerged in the city.
She said the lab had not seen or studied the virus before that.
Photo: AP
“US President Trump’s claim that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from our institute totally contradicts the facts,” Shi said in the article published on Friday. “It jeopardizes and affects our academic work and personal life. He owes us an apology.”
Trump, who has repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as the “China Virus,” and US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo have suggested a link between the Wuhan lab and the outbreak, although no evidence has ever been presented publicly.
While Shi, who is renowned for her work on coronaviruses in bats, has previously dismissed any link between the virus and the lab, her comments in the interview provided the most detailed rebuttal yet:
The WIV has identified hundreds of bat viruses, but never anything close to SARS-CoV-2, Shi said.
Questions have been raised about a possible link with RaTG13, a bat virus similar to SARS-CoV-2.
Shi said the lab did not culture that bat virus, making an accident unlikely.
Shi said differences in the sequences of the two viruses suggest they diverged from a common ancestor 20 to 70 years ago.
Shi’s partial genome sequencing in 2016 of a coronavirus she called 4991 led to suspicions it was SARS-CoV-2, but she said 4991 is actually RaTG13: 4991 was named for the bat, and was switched to RaTG13 after the entire virus was sequenced.
Years of surveillance in Hubei Province has not turned up bat coronaviruses close to SARS-CoV-2, leading her to believe the jump from animals to humans happened elsewhere, she said.
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