UK Scientists Claim COVID-19 Virus Detected In Chinese Lab Samples

Scientists claim they have made a breakthrough in the search for the origins of COVID-19 after an early version of the virus was detected in lab samples, Jacob Paul reported for UK’s Daily Express.

Photo Insert: Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan

The discovery could boost the theory that coronavirus was originally leaked from a lab. The samples were found in soil and came from a Chinese biotechnology firm. They had been sent to the Sangon Biotech in Shanghai to be sequenced back in December 2019.

It is thought they had been contaminated with a previously unknown variant of the virus. The suspicion now is that Sangon Biotech was the source of the virus. Scientists from the University of Veterinary Medicine and Lorand University in Hungary stumbled upon the discovery by chance when analyzing genetic soil sample data.

The samples were also found to have DNA from hamsters and monkeys. Some experts claim this suggests the early version of the virus was grown in a lab using animals or their cells. Matt Ridley, author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, said: “The unique mutations hint at it being an ancestral variant. So if it were sequenced in say mid-December, before anybody had identified the virus in people and started trying to grow it in labs, then it points to secret samples in labs in 2019.”

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, where some suspect the virus was leaked from, is known to use Sangon Biotech for sequencing. But it may be possible the DNA samples were contaminated by the earliest COVID-19 patients in China. While experts have not been able to pinpoint the date when sequencing on the samples was done, it is understood that the samples were sent to Sangon biotech in December 2019.

Dr. Jesse Bloom, a virologist from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, also confirmed that the Antarctic samples did contain Covid after re-running the data. This suggests that there were three key mutations that linked the first strain in humans, Wuhan-Hu-1, to coronaviruses in bats.

Dr. Bloom said: “Those three mutations are intriguing because they are all ancestral mutations that move the sequence ‘closer’ to the bat coronavirus relatives… first reported Wuhan-Hu-1 sequence from the Huanan Seafood Market.”

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