Covid: Wuhan scientist would welcome visit probing lab leak theory

A Chinese scientist at the centre of unsubstantiated claims that the coronavirus leaked from her laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan has told the BBC she is open to “any kind of visit” to rule it out. The surprise statement from Prof Shi Zhengli comes as a World Health Organization (WHO) team prepares to travel to Wuhan next month to begin its investigation into the origins of Covid-19.

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The remote district of Tongguan, in China’s south-western province of Yunnan, is hard to reach at the best of times. But when a BBC team tried to visit recently, it was impossible.

Plain-clothes police officers and other officials in unmarked cars followed us for miles along the narrow, bumpy roads, stopping when we did, backtracking with us when we were forced to turn around.

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We found obstacles in our way, including a “broken-down” lorry, which locals confirmed had been placed across the road a few minutes before we arrived.

And we ran into checkpoints at which unidentified men told us their job was to keep us out.

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At first sight, all of this might seem like a disproportionate effort given our intended destination, a nondescript, abandoned copper mine in which, back in 2012, six workers succumbed to a mystery illness that eventually claimed the lives of three of them.

But their tragedy, which would otherwise almost certainly have been largely forgotten, has been given new meaning by the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Those three deaths are now at the centre of a major scientific controversy about the origins of the virus and the question of whether it came from nature, or from a laboratory.

And the attempts of Chinese authorities to stop us reaching the site are a sign of how hard they’re working to control the narrative.

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For more than a decade, the rolling, jungle-covered hills in Yunnan — and the cave systems within — have been the focus of a giant scientific field study.

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It has been led by Prof Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

Prof Shi won international acclaim for her discovery that the illness known as Sars, which killed more than 700 people in 2003, was caused by a virus that probably came from a species of bat in a Yunnan cave.

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Ever since, Prof Shi — often referred to as “China’s Batwoman” — has been in the vanguard of a project to try to predict and prevent further such outbreaks.

By trapping bats, taking faecal samples from them, and then carrying those samples back to the lab in Wuhan, 1,600km (1,000 miles) away, the team behind the project has identified hundreds of new bat coronaviruses.

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But the fact that Wuhan is now home to the world’s leading coronavirus research facility, as well as the first city to be ravaged by a pandemic outbreak of a deadly new one, has fuelled suspicion that the two things are connected.

It has been led by Prof Shi Zhengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

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Prof Shi won international acclaim for her discovery that the illness known as Sars, which killed more than 700 people in 2003, was caused by a virus that probably came from a species of bat in a Yunnan cave.

Ever since, Prof Shi — often referred to as “China’s Batwoman” — has been in the vanguard of a project to try to predict and prevent further such outbreaks.

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By trapping bats, taking faecal samples from them, and then carrying those samples back to the lab in Wuhan, 1,600km (1,000 miles) away, the team behind the project has identified hundreds of new bat coronaviruses.

But the fact that Wuhan is now home to the world’s leading coronavirus research facility, as well as the first city to be ravaged by a pandemic outbreak of a deadly new one, has fuelled suspicion that the two things are connected.

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The Chinese government, the WIV, and Prof Shi have all angrily dismissed the allegation of a virus leak from the Wuhan lab.

But with scientists appointed by the WHO scheduled to visit Wuhan in January for an inquiry into the origin of the pandemic, Prof Shi — who has given few interviews since the pandemic began — answered a number of BBC questions by email.

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“I have communicated with the WHO experts twice,” she wrote, when asked if an investigation might help rule out a lab leak and end the speculation. “I have personally and clearly expressed that I would welcome them to visit the WIV,” she said.

To a follow-up question about whether that would include a formal investigation with access to the WIV’s experimental data and laboratory records, Prof Shi said: “I would personally welcome any form of visit based on an open, transparent, trusting, reliable and reasonable dialogue. But the specific plan is not decided by me.”

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The BBC subsequently received a call from the WIV’s press office, saying that Prof Shi was speaking in a personal capacity and her answers had not been approved by the WIV.

The BBC denied a request to send the press office a copy of this article in advance.

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Many scientists believe that by far the most likely scenario is that Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, jumped naturally from bats to humans, possibly via an intermediary species. And despite Prof Shi’s offer, for now there appears to be little chance of the WHO inquiry looking into the lab-leak theory.

The terms of reference for the WHO inquiry make no mention of the theory, and some members of the 10-person team have all but ruled it out.

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Peter Daszak, a British zoologist, has been chosen as part of the team because of his leading role in a multimillion dollar, international project to sample wild viruses.

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It has involved close collaboration with Prof Shi Zhengli in her mass sampling of bats in China, and Dr Daszak previously called the lab-leak theory a “conspiracy theory” and “pure baloney”.

“I’ve yet to see any evidence at all of a lab leak or a lab involvement in this outbreak,” he said. “I have seen substantial evidence that these are naturally occurring phenomena driven by human encroachment into wildlife habitat, which is clearly on display across south-east Asia.”

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Asked about seeking access to the Wuhan lab to rule the lab-leak theory out, he said: “That’s not my job to do that.

“The WHO negotiated the terms of reference, and they say we’re going to follow the evidence, and that’s what we’ve got to do,” he added.

One focus of the inquiry will be a market in Wuhan which was known to be trading in wildlife and was linked to a number of early cases, though the Chinese authorities appear to have already discounted it as a source of the virus.

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Dr Daszak said the WHO team would “look at those clusters of cases, look at the contacts, look at where the animals in the market have come from and see where that takes us”.

The deaths of the three Tongguan workers following exposure to a mineshaft full of bats raised suspicions that they’d succumbed to a bat coronavirus.

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It was exactly the kind of animal-to-human “spillover” that was driving the WIV to sample and test bats in Yunnan.

It is no surprise then that, following those deaths, the WIV scientists began sampling bats in the Tongguan mineshaft in earnest, making multiple visits over the next three years and detecting 293 coronaviruses.

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But apart from one brief paper, very little was published about the viruses they collected on those trips.

In January this year, Prof Shi Zhengli became one of the first people in the world to sequence Sars-Cov-2, which was already spreading rapidly through the streets and homes of her city.

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She then compared the long string of letters representing the virus’s unique genetic code with the extensive library of other viruses collected and stored over the years.

And she discovered that her database contained the closest known relative of Sars-Cov-2.

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RaTG13 is a virus whose name has been derived from the bat it was extracted from (Rhinolophus affinis, Ra), the place it was found (Tongguan, TG), and the year it was identified, 2013.

Seven years after it was found in that mineshaft, RaTG13 was about to become one of the most hotly contested scientific subjects of our time.

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There have been many well-documented cases of viruses leaking from labs. The first Sars virus, for example, leaked twice from the National Institute of Virology in Beijing in 2004, long after the outbreak had been brought under control.

The practice of genetically manipulating viruses is also not new, allowing scientists to make them more infectious or more deadly, so they can assess the threat and, perhaps, develop tre