China to no longer consider COVID lab leak version
Chinese scientists will no longer consider the version of the coronavirus leak from the Wuhan laboratory until they have new evidence to support this assumption, Liang Wannian, team leader of the Chinese side of the WHO-China joint expert team, said in an interview with the , Report informs.
“There are various possibilities for the virus origin. During this joint study, our experts visited Hubei Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutes and bio-safety labs. They also had candid, deep communication with experts from those institutions. After their field visits and study, the experts team agreed unanimously that it is extremely unlikely that the virus leaked from the lab. So future virus origins-tracing missions will no longer be focused on this area, unless there is new evidence,” he said.
“To be specific, the onset date of the earliest case was set at December 8, 2019. Disease surveillance and early case search did not find any earlier cases than that one. Second, the Huanan seafood market played a role in the occurrence and development of the epidemic, and played an important role in the detection of the epidemic. Third, the virus is of natural origin. The most likely transmission route was from the natural host to the intermediate host, and then to humans. Fourth, cold chain transmission, a new mode of transmission, plays an important part in the origin and transmission of the epidemic. Fifth, it is extremely unlikely that the outbreak was caused by a laboratory leak,” he noted.