Coronavirus 'unlikely leaked from lab', Chinese researchers claim again

Chinese researchers have again claimed that the novel coronavirus was unlikely leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The Global Times, owned by The Chinese Communist Party, published a report on Tuesday over the findings of the research.

The newspaper says the study from the WIV and the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences on BioRxiv further refutes the ‘hyped lab leak theory that the virus came from the laboratory’ ahead of the World Health Assembly (WHA).

“The research shows that none of the known viruses of the bat SARSr-CoV-2 lineage or its novel variant uses the human ACE2 as efficiently as SARSr-CoV-2 from pangolins or some of the SARSr-CoV-1 lineage viruses,” The Global Times says.

"These results suggested the SARSr-CoVs discovered in bats now may be just the tip of the iceberg. These viruses may have experienced selection or recombination events in the animal hosts and rendered viral adaption to a new host and then spread to the new species before they jumped to humans," researchers said in the report.

Bats and pangolins are recognised as the most probable reservoir hosts that harbour viruses that are very similar to SARS-CoV-2.

Based on the report, it is safe to say that bats are probable ancestors of the coronavirus that led to SARS in 2003 and the recent COVID-19 pandemic, and coronavirus strains discovered in pangolins are closer to the novel coronavirus in humans, Yang Zhanqiu, a virologist from the Wuhan University, told the Global Times on Tuesday, noting that the report still did not explain how the virus transferred and adapted from bats to humans via pangolins.   

But the results were enough to demonstrate that it is unlikely that the coronavirus leading to the deadly COVID-19 pandemic leaked from the WIV, a Beijing-based immunology expert told the Global Times on Tuesday on condition of anonymity.

"When we say a virus is from a lab, we are indicating that either the virus, or a highly similar virus, is leaked from a lab, or a virus is manufactured by man in a lab. But the two possibilities have both been refuted so far by scientific research," Zhuang Shilihe, a Guangzhou-based expert, told the Global Times on Tuesday.

The most likely process is that the coronavirus from bats had mutated in nature for decades before it successfully infected humans and led to the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, Zhuang said.

US politicians and media outlets have been pursuing the lab leak theory as the origin of COVID-19, despite scientists from the WHO-China joint study team concluding, in a full report after their field study in Wuhan, that a lab leak is extremely unlikely.