Washington, May 24
Three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology sought hospital care in November 2019, weeks before Beijing disclosed the Covid-19 pandemic, a US media report said, citing a previously undisclosed American intelligence document that could add weight to growing calls for a full-scale probe of whether the coronavirus may have escaped from China’s top bio lab.
The details of the reporting go beyond a State Department fact sheet, issued during the final days of the Trump administration, which said that several researchers at the Wuhan lab, a centre for the study of coronaviruses and other pathogens, became sick in autumn 2019 “with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illness”, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The origins of the Covid-19 remain a widely debated topic, with some scientists and politicians maintaining that the possibility of a lab leak of the deadly virus exists.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is near the outbreak’s known epicentre of Huanan Seafood Market in central China’s Wuhan city, where the virus first emerged in late 2019 and became a pandemic.
Former US president Donald Trump was among those who supported the theory that the virus might have escaped from a bio lab in China.
“Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became sick enough in November 2019 that they sought hospital care,” the newspaper said.
The disclosure of the number of Chinese researchers, the timing of their illnesses and their hospital visits come on the eve of a meeting of the World Health Organisation’s decision-making body, which is expected to discuss the next phase of an investigation into Covid-19’s origins.
The paper said that current and former officials familiar with the intelligence about the lab researchers expressed differing views about the strength of the supporting evidence, with one person saying it was provided by an international partner and was potentially significant but still in need of further investigation and additional corroboration.
Another person described intelligence as stronger. “The information that we had coming from the various sources was of exquisite quality. It was very precise. What it didn’t tell you was exactly why they got sick,” he said, referring to the researchers.
In a detailed article titled ‘The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan’ published in the prestigious Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists early this month, noted British science writer, editor and author Nicholas Wade raised several questions on the origin of the novel coronavirus that has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year and caused over three million deaths and wrecked global economies.
The evidence adds up to a serious case that the SARS2 virus could have been created in a lab, from which it then escaped, wrote Wade, who refers to SARS-CoV-2 virus as SARS2 in short.
Earlier this month, a group of leading UK and US scientists called for more investigation to determine the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic, including the theory of an accidental release from a lab in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
In a letter published in the journal ‘Science’, the experts from world leading universities such as Harvard, Stanford and MIT said knowing how Covid-19 emerged is critical for informing global strategies to mitigate the risk of future outbreaks.
They caution that hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers must be taken seriously until there is sufficient data.
In May 2020, the World Health Assembly requested that the World Health Organisation (WHO) director-general work with partners to determine the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
A team of WHO experts, which probed the origin of the coronavirus, concluded in March that “all hypotheses” included the allegation that Covid-19 could have emanated from a bio lab “remained open”.
World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, while receiving the report of the international experts’ team which visited Wuhan, said on March 30 that “as far as the WHO is concerned, all hypotheses remain on the table”.
