China’s ‘bat woman’ virologist rules out Covid-19 virus in fresh tests on old cave samples
- In an update to an earlier paper that spawned conspiracy theories, Shi Zhengli details how they found a bat virus ‘96 per cent similar’ to the pandemic coronavirus
- No signs of the new virus in samples taken from miners sickened eight years ago, she says
Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli, known as China’s “bat woman” for her extensive research on coronaviruses in the mammals, released the details in an update published this week in the scientific journal Nature, expanding on a paper released in February.
In the update, Shi said her team recently retested the samples taken from the miners and confirmed that they were not infected with Sars-CoV-2.
The update also details how she and her team found the bat coronavirus – known as RaTG13 – in 2012.
Shi,who heads the Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has been at the centre of unfounded speculation, ranging from claims that the coronavirus was engineered in her laboratory to a leakage of a natural bat virus her team was studying.
