Trump ‘owes us an apology.’ Chinese scientist at the center of COVID-19 origin theories speaks out
By
Jon Cohen Jul. 24, 2020 , 3:45 PM
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The coronavirus pandemic has thrust virologist Shi Zhengli into a fierce spotlight. Shi, who’s been
nicknamed “Bat Woman,” heads a group that studies bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), in the city in China where the pandemic began, and many have speculated that the virus that causes COVID-19 accidentally escaped from her lab—a theory
promoted by U.S. President Donald Trump. Some have even suggested it could have been engineered there.
China has forcefully rejected such claims, but Shi (pronounced SHIH) herself has said very little publicly.
Now, Shi has broken her silence about the details of her work. On 15 July, she emailed
Science answers to a series of written questions about the virus’ origin and the research at her institute. In them, Shi hit back at speculation that the virus leaked from WIV. She and her colleagues discovered the virus in late 2019, she says, in samples from patients who had a pneumonia of unknown origin. “Before that, we had never been in contact with or studied this virus, nor did we know of its existence,” Shi wrote.
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Science shared Shi’s responses—
available here in full (PDF)—with several leading researchers in other countries. “It’s a big contribution,” says Daniel Lucey of Georgetown University, an outbreak specialist who
blogs about SARS-CoV-2 origin issues. “There are a lot of new facts that I wasn’t aware of. It’s very exciting to hear this directly from her.”
Shi’s answers were coordinated with public information staffers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, of which WIV is part, and it took her 2 months to prepare them. Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research says he suspects Shi’s answers were “carefully vetted” by the Chinese government. “But they’re all logical, genuine, and stick to the science as one would have expected from a world-class scientist and one of the leading experts on coronaviruses,” Andersen says.
However, Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, who from the early days of the pandemic has urged that an investigation look into the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through a laboratory accident, was decidedly unimpressed. “Most of these answers are formulaic, almost robotic, reiterations of statements previously made by Chinese authorities and state media,” Ebright says...
