Chinese research lab ‘badly hurt’ by man-made coronavirus rumours
- Wuhan Institute of Virology says conspiracy theories have ‘seriously interrupted the emergency research we are doing’
- They include that the virus strain was ‘leaked from the WIV lab’ and it was ‘taken over by the military’
“The rumours … have caused severe damage to our researchers who have been dedicated to working on the front line, and seriously interrupted the emergency research we are doing during the epidemic,” the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which is affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said in a statement.
Those rumours included that the new virus strain was “man-made”, “leaked from the WIV lab”, that “the WIV was taken over by the military”, “a WIV researcher died from the leaked virus”, “a WIV student is patient zero”, and “a WIV researcher reported to authorities that the WIV chief was responsible” for the epidemic, the statement posted on its website on Wednesday said.
The institute runs the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, the only facility in China equipped to diagnose and research easily transmitted pathogens at the highest biosafety level of four.
It said it had first received a sample of the coronavirus on December 30 and responded quickly – completing the whole genome sequencing by January 2, which it submitted to the World Health Organisation on January 11.
