Was the US complicit in China’s Covid research?

It’s time to put US collaboration with Chinese scientists on ‘gain of function’ coronavirus research under a microscope 

The Joe Biden administration closed the US State Department’s investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

But as the pandemic recedes in the United States, there is renewed interest by the scientific and journalistic communities about the origins of the virus and whether it could have escaped from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). So, a day later, the president opened a new investigation.

The flip-flop came amid Senator Rand Paul’s claim at a Senate committee hearing on the Covid-19 pandemic that the US collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to make a more deadly, transmittable coronavirus. That’s putting the Chinese lab leak theory, which Beijing vigorously denies, back at the forefront of the Covid-19 origin debate.

Based on papers published by WIV on the scientific work of Dr Shi Zhengli, the US government investigators have some catching up to do. In 2015, Dr Shi – popularly known as the “bat lady” – published a paper entitled “A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses show potential for human emergence.”

Her colleagues on the study included American researchers associated with the University of North Carolina’s Department of Cell Biology and may be related to work funded by the US government.

It is possible, although we don’t know, that Dr Shi and her team successfully converted a coronavirus, specifically SARS-like virus SHCO14-CoV, from bats to other animals and not only mice. It is also possible, but not proven, that the new virus quickly spread to other animals and then to lab workers, three of whom became sick in November 2019, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.

This is known as “gain of function” research, which is considered by the US to very dangerous. Between 2014 and 2017, gain of function research, which had been actively subsidized by The National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies, was suspended in the US.

Slightly later, in 2019, the US temporarily closed some laboratories, including the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, over safety issues.

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