Chinese scientists were working closely with the country’s military just weeks before the outbreak of the pandemic in a bid to create a mutant virus capable of being used as a biological weapon, US investigators have claimed.
The origins of COVID-19 remain a mystery, with one Chinese scientist recently admitting the theory that it “leaked” out of a laboratory could not be discounted.
Now a new in-depth probe has offered a detailed picture of what happened inside the secretive Wuhan Institute of Virology in the final months of 2019.
The first fatalities were not reported to the World Health Organisation (WHO) until the end of the year, with a press release issued at the start of 2020 warning of an unspecified lung disease.
The first cases of what was eventually named COVID-19 were traced to a seafood market in the city of Wuhan – but there is no proof that that is where the virus crossed over into the human population.
The institute is known to have been undertaking increasingly dangerous experiments on coronaviruses gathered from bat caves in southern China, initially making its findings public.
However, this all stopped after a strain was found in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province which had claimed several lives.
As happened later, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities, and the viruses found in the cave are now recognised as the only members of COVID-19’s immediate family to have existed before the pandemic.
They were subsequently transported to the institute, with scientists working on them in secrecy.
One US investigator told The Sunday Times: “The trail of papers starts to go dark. That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off.
“My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to the army’s pursuit of dual-use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”
The programme was specifically intended to repurpose the mineshaft viruses to make them more infectious to humans, the US team believes, with it subsequently escaping into Wuhan via a laboratory accident.
Another investigator claimed: “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
* Article From: The Daily Express