China lab created coronavirus '10,000-times stronger than usual' as fears rage over Wuhan 'leak', scientists warn
A WUHAN lab created coronavirus strains that were up to 10,000-times stronger than usual — amid fears a virus could have escaped when a technician was bitten by a mouse.
Bombshell documents have emerged which reveal how Chinese research funded by a US government agency involved souping up the virus and then transmitting it to "humanised mice".
The documents – released by US Right to Know – show grant applications between 2017 and 2019 by US nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance which were lodged with White House advisor Dr Fauci Anthony's National Institute of Health (NIH).
The research was carried out in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China and studied coronavirus found in bats which had been captured in a former copper mine in Mojiang, some 1118 miles away from the lab.
Richard Ebright, biosafety expert and professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, told The Sun Online the papers show this involved dangerous experiments that may led one of the bugs escaping the lab.
The research appears to involve making bat coronaviruses more virulent — potentially having viral loads up to 10,000 times higher than normal.
Mice, which had been "humanised" by splicing them with human tissue, were then infected with the altered virus.
But worryingly, some of the coronavirusues were manipulated to make them extremely hazardous. Dr Ebright warned.
He said: "The documents further reveal that at least three of the laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses exhibited much higher —10 times to 10,000 times higher — viral load in humanised mice than the starting bat virus from which they were constructed."
The viral load means the souped-up bug may cause a more dangerous infection because of the high amount of virus particles entering the victim's blood or plasma.
Professor Wang Yanyi, the director, has previously denied all allegations of a leak from the Wuhan lab and claimed her facility is "100 per cent" safe – and China has aggressively pushed back against Western allegations.
But Dr Ebright told The Sun Online: "Clearly, a lab leak is the by far most likely explanation for the current pandemic which is further supported by these new documents.
"Any virologist who claims the opposite has now the burden to prove a natural origin.
"In particular, the Chinese researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have to provide access to their coronavirus database which they deleted in September 2019 as well as to their lab notebooks and safety procedure protocols."
Clearly, a lab leak is the by far most likely explanation for the current pandemic which is further supported by these new documents
It comes as it emerged twenty six of the twenty-seven scientists who publicly trashed the Covid lab leak theory reportedly have links to Wuhan researchers.
The group published a letter in March last year denouncing "conspiracy theories" that the virus was made or leaked from the centre in the Chinese city.
Echoing the views of many virus scientists across the world, Professor Nikolai Petrovsky, director of endocrinology at Flinders University in Australia, told The Sun Online the gain-of-function risked a leak via a lab worker.
He said: "The use of humanised mice to study these genetically modified SARSr-CoV viruses would significantly increase the risk of the virus escaping, either through escape of an infected mouse, risk of an infected mouse transmitting the virus to a human handler by biting or aerosols or improper disposal of an infected mouse.
Dr Roland Wiesendanger, from the University of Hamburg, told The Sun Online: "Clearly, a lab leak is the by far most likely explanation for the current pandemic which is further supported by these new documents.
"Any virologist who claims the opposite has now the burden to prove a natural origin.
"In particular, the Chinese researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have to provide access to their coronavirus database which they deleted in September 2019 as well as to their lab notebooks and safety procedure protocols."
US Federal funding for gain-of-function experiments that increase the transmissibility or lethality of viruses was temporarily suspended in 2014 because it risked leaking super viruses into the human population and sparking a pandemic.
Funding resumed in late 2017, but only for projects that went through the new Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight framework.
That framework includes the Department of Health and Human Services review board evaluating whether grants for the dangerous research was needed and was safely done.
But the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told the Daily Caller News Foundation that it opted not to flag the EcoHealth Alliance grant because the project "did not involve the enhancement of the pathogenicity or transmissibility of the viruses studied".
Dr Fauci said during a congressional hearing in May that the NIH and NIAID "categorically has not funded gain-of-function research to be conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology".
This led Republican Sen. Rand Paul to send a criminal referral to the Department of Justice in July to probe whether Fauci lied.
'FAUCI LIED — JAIL HIM'
He told Fox News' Sean Hannity that Fauci should be jailed for lying to Congress. "It's a felony punishable by five years in jail," Paul said.
One of the grant documents was initiated by British zoologist Peter Daszak, president of the US-based EcoHealth Alliance, was part of the WHO mission to investigate the origins of Covid-19.
The 55-year-old has a close relationship with the lab's chief Dr Shi Zhengli – dubbed "Batwoman" — and was last year jovially tweeting about singing karaoke with her and "partying in a bat cave" amid the pandemic.
He has strongly condemned any suggestion that the virus came from the institute.
And had also previously denied that live bats were being studied at WIV — only for footage to emerge appearing to show the animals being handled at the lab.
Dr Daszak has now "recused himself" from the inquiry by leading medical journal the Lancet after he failed to declare ties to the Wuhan Laboratory of Virology, which was conducting research into coronaviruses in bats.
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