Sen. Ted Cruz on Wednesday raised the notion that the coronavirus sweeping across the world was accidentally released from a laboratory in China.
The Texas Republican said there was research being done on viruses in a lab just a few miles away from a “wet market” in Wuhan, where Chinese officials say the virus emerge, allegedly from people eating bats on other exotic animals.
“We know that at that facility, they were researching highly, highly infectious diseases including coronaviruses – including coronaviruses that [derive] from bats,” Cruz said on Fox Business Network. “And so they’re researching the exact same type of disease that became this pandemic.”
“There is a very natural question to ask of well, did somebody make a mistake? Were they studying this virus and did it escape accidentally, and is that part of why the communist government in China tried so hard to cover this up?” Cruz said, adding that it seems “plausible, if not likely” the virus was being studied the lab.
“The natural inference, if there’s [an] outbreak right next to where they’re studying this virus is well somehow it escaped, presumably accidentally,” he said. “We don’t know that, but China doesn’t want that question answered for the world to know.”
But an analysis of SARS-CoV-2 says otherwise, a group of researchers said last month. They compared the genome of the new coronavirus with the seven other coronaviruses known to infect humans and drew a clear conclusion: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” they wrote in the journal Nature Medicine.
“The overall molecular structure of this virus is distinct from the known coronaviruses and instead most closely resembles viruses found in bats and pangolins that had been little studied and never known to cause humans any harm,” the researchers wrote.
Still, rumors spread quickly that the virus emerged from a lab.
The Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology in February put out a directive titled: “Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”
It turns out that in all of China there is only one such lab, the New York Post writes. “And this one is located in the Chinese city of Wuhan that just happens to be . . . the epicenter of the epidemic.”
That’s right. China’s only Level 4 microbiology lab that is equipped to handle deadly coronaviruses, called the National Biosafety Laboratory, is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
What’s more, the People’s Liberation Army’s top expert in biological warfare, a Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, was dispatched to Wuhan at the end of January to help with the effort to contain the outbreak.
According to the PLA Daily, Gen. Chen has been researching coronaviruses since the SARS outbreak of 2003, as well as Ebola and anthrax. This would not be her first trip to the Wuhan Institute of Virology either, since it is one of only two bioweapons research labs in all of China.
The Post also said some lab workers who do tests on animals later cash in by selling those creatures to local markets.
“Instead of properly disposing of infected animals by cremation, as the law requires, they sell them on the side to make a little extra cash. Or, in some cases, a lot of extra cash. One Beijing researcher, now in jail, made a million dollars selling his monkeys and rats on the live animal market, where they eventually wound up in someone’s stomach,” The Post said.
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