The Trump Wuhan Lab

People wondered where President Trump got his information about the China Wuhan Lab.  Here is it:  from the Falun Gong newspaper Epoch Times, conspiracy theories peddler and one that got unprecedented access to the Trump administration.  Among its readers, none other than Steve Bannon himself.

The video was professionally made and presented claims and data layman like me or Donald Trump found difficult to digest.  One "medical expert" feature prominently in the video is Judy A. Mikovits.  She is an American anti-vaccination activist who made discredited claims about vaccines, coronavirus, and chronic fatigue syndrome.  She was fired from her job for alleged manipulation of data and known purveyor of conspiracy theories.  So much for President Trump's expert advises and "enormous" evidence.  Let's hope this theory would come to rest upon the NIH director Francis Collins assessment on May 27 that there was having no way of knowing that the virus originated from the Lab.  So much for Trump and Pompeo's virus conspiracy theory.

All these weirdness were only inconveniences to be brushed aside so that Trump and his acolytes can push their narrative to benefit his re-election.

Inasmuch as for the Trump folly, we should subscribe to the piece's assessment of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  If we think Trump is bad, the CCP is hundred times worse.  We should resist the CCP, but not in the haphazard and half-hearted way of Donald Trump.  We are to strengthen American democracy, not destroying it in the case of Donald Trump.  The last four years he made the United States more like a Chinese governance.  That's why to prevent the United States from going the direction of the CCP, we must not let him have another term.

Video at The Epoch Time Website
https://www.theepochtimes.com/coronavirusfilm?utm_source=Epoch_Times&utm_medium=Banner

Epoch Times English edition.  It came years after the Chinese edition.

The Epoch Times Chinese Edition

Epoch Times employee handing info to President Trump

President Trump meeting persecuted Falun Gong practitioner

Falun Gong Practitioners

When Senator Rick Scott declined to give evidence to substantiate his claim of the Wuhan Lab progeny of Covid-19, claiming his source was from the intelligence community, he was actually too embarrassed to admit that his "intelligence" actually came from the new age Falungong movement.
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China says U.S. Senator Scott should present evidence of COVID-19 wrongdoing
Reuters (06/08/20)

BEIJING, June 8 (Reuters) - China said on Monday that U.S. Senator Rick Scott should present the evidence for his accusation that Beijing is trying to slow down or sabotage the development of a COVID-19 vaccine by western countries.

In this Jan. 6, 2016, file photo, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying speaks during a briefing at the Chinese Foreign Ministry in Beijing. China has denied a New York Times report that Chinese spies are listening to President Donald Trump's phone calls and suggests he exchange his iPhone for a cellphone made by Chinese manufacturer Huawei. The Foreign Ministry spokeswoman told reporters without citing evidence that the report was "fake news," using language similar to how Trump has accused the media of fabricating stories.

Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying made the remarks during a daily briefing on Monday, responding to the Republican senator's comments during an interview on BBC TV.

Scott declined to give details on the evidence when asked during the interview but said it had come through the intelligence community. (Reporting by Huizhong Wu; writing by Se Young Lee; Editing by Toby Chopra)

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Trump Says China Made ‘Horrible Mistake,’ Tried to Mask Outbreak
Jordan Fabian and Jennifer Jacobs

President Donald Trump said he has little doubt that China misled the world about the scale and risk of the coronavirus outbreak and then sought to cover it up as the disease became a global pandemic.

“I think they made a very horrible mistake,” Trump said during an interview Sunday night on Fox News. “They tried to cover it.”

The president then alluded to additional information he said will be coming out soon to back up his claims, which China has rejected. Earlier, the Associated Press reported that U.S. officials believe China covered up the extent of the outbreak, in part, to stock up on medical supplies needed to respond to it.

The president’s comments come as U.S.-China tensions climb amid the rising death toll from the virus in the U.S., which has the highest reported numbers of infections and deaths of any country, despite the outbreak first spreading more quickly in Asia and Europe. More than 65,000 people have died from the virus in the U.S. so far, out of a reported 247,000 worldwide.

Ambulnz paramedics and Aurora firefighters salute as the casket carrying the body of paramedic Paul Cary is removed from a plane at Denver International Airport on May 3 in Denver, Colorado. Cary died from coronavirus after volunteering to help combat the pandemic in New York City.

Earlier in the day, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said “enormous evidence” shows the Covid-19 outbreak began in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, but didn’t provide any proof for his claims.

“I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan,” Pompeo said on ABC’s “This Week.” “These are not the first times that we’ve had a world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab.”

Pompeo stopped short of saying the virus was man-made, noting that he agreed with a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that ruled out genetic modification or it having been man-made.

“I’ve seen what the intelligence community has said,” said Pompeo. “I have no reason to believe that they’ve got it wrong.” Pompeo declined to say whether the Chinese intentionally released the virus. “I don’t have anything to say about that,” he said.

In his interview on Sunday, Trump declined to directly criticize Chinese President Xi Jinping, calling him a “strong” leader who he struck a trade deal with just as the outbreak was spreading.

“I’m not going to say anything,” Trump responded when asked about Xi. “I had a very good relationship with him.”

Trump and his aides sharpened their criticism of Beijing last week, demanding answers about the virus’s origin. The president tweeted Friday that some U.S. television networks are “Chinese puppets,” while his super-political action committee unleashed anti-China ads.

“China behaved like authoritarian regimes do, attempted to conceal and hide and confuse,” Pompeo said on ABC. “It employed the World Health Organization as a tool to do the same.”

The secretary said China continued to block access by health experts from the WHO, as well as U.S. scientists, from getting access to samples of the virus needed for study.

“This is an ongoing threat, an ongoing pandemic,” Pompeo said. “The Chinese Communist Party continues to block access to the Western world, the world’s best scientists, to figure out exactly what happened.”

For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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Pompeo Ties Coronavirus to China Lab, Despite Spy Agencies’ Uncertainty
David E. Sanger

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday backed President Trump’s assertion that the coronavirus originated in a research laboratory in Wuhan, China, though the nation’s intelligence agencies say they have reached no conclusion on the issue.

 Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a news conference last week. He accused China on Sunday of covering up evidence: “They shut down reporting — all the kind of things that authoritarian regimes do.”

Speaking on the ABC program “This Week,” Mr. Pompeo, the former C.I.A. chief and one of the senior administration officials who is most hawkish on dealing with China, said that “there’s enormous evidence” that the coronavirus came from the lab, though he agreed with the intelligence assessment that there was no indication that the virus was man-made or genetically modified.

The theories are not mutually exclusive: Some officials who have examined the intelligence reports, which remain classified, say it is possible an animal that was infected with the coronavirus in the laboratory was destroyed, and a lab worker was accidentally infected in the process. But that is just one of many theories still being examined.

Senior American officials, including those who have looked at intelligence and who favor the lab theory, have said in private that evidence pointing to a lab accident is mainly circumstantial and based on public material. Intelligence officers have told senior administration officials that they probably will not find proof of a lab accident. And among scientists and especially virologists, there is largely agreement that the chances that a lab accident sparked the outbreak are slim, while the probability that the new virus made the leap from an animal to a human in a non-lab setting in southern China is much higher.

Mr. Pompeo repeatedly accused China’s Communist Party, led by President Xi Jinping, of covering up evidence and denying American experts access to the research lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“We’ve seen the fact that they kicked the journalists out,” Mr. Pompeo said, referring to orders that American correspondents from The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal leave China. “We saw the fact that those who were trying to report on this, medical professionals inside of China, were silenced. They shut down reporting — all the kind of things that authoritarian regimes do, the way Communist parties operate.”

Mr. Pompeo is among the small group of senior officials believed to be pushing American spy agencies to find evidence to support the theory that the government laboratory in Wuhan was the origin of the outbreak. The Chinese government has vigorously denied that the virus leaked from the laboratory, and at one point suggested that the American military created it.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a statement on Thursday saying it was continuing to “rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence” to determine whether the outbreak began with infected animals or whether “it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”

The same day, Mr. Trump said he had a high degree of confidence that the laboratory was the source of the outbreak, but when pressed for evidence said, “I’m not allowed to tell you that.” In a Sunday night interview on Fox News, he promised a report on the subject, which he said would be conclusive. “I think they made a horrible mistake, and they didn’t want to admit it,” he said of China.

Some intelligence analysts are concerned that the pressure from administration officials could distort the final assessments about the virus’s origin, and that they could be used as a political weapon in an intensifying battle with China over a disease that has infected more than three million people across the globe.

If the administration continues on the path that Mr. Pompeo and Mr. Trump have blazed in recent days, they will doubtless come under increasing pressure to make available some of the evidence that led them to their conclusions. But that could prove tricky, as it did for the Bush administration when, after the invasion of Iraq, it was under pressure to make public the assessments it received that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction. That evidence turned out to be flawed — and some of the government agencies with the most expertise on the issue wrote dissents that were ignored or overruled.

In the case of the coronavirus, declassifying the evidence about the Wuhan laboratory is more complex. Some evidence appears to be based on electronic intercepts of communications among Chinese officials, and revealing those could well expose details of how the United States keeps track of Chinese leadership. As a result, Mr. Trump and Mr. Pompeo are likely to fall back on the usual explanation that they cannot risk revealing sources and methods of intelligence collection.

Some American officials say even intercepts of Chinese officials in Beijing discussing questions surrounding the lab could be circumstantial, since central-level officials always suspect local officials of hiding information and so want to examine all possibilities as they investigate. And American officials say they had little in the way of intelligence collection focused on Wuhan officials before the outbreak.

They would also have to explain doubts within the government about the intelligence, which is not unusual in the case of a complex problem like decoding the origins of a virus. An April 7 meeting convened by Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, failed to gain a consensus among intelligence officials about how the outbreak occurred, suggesting that any evidence that gets released may not be conclusive.

And some American allies also seem skeptical of the Wuhan laboratory theory.

At the same time, Mr. Pompeo was correct in his assertions that Chinese government officials went to considerable lengths to cover up evidence about the outbreak and detained scientists who warned about it. They closed a laboratory in Shanghai after one of its lead scientists shared the genomic sequence of the virus with collaborators around the world. That data has been critical to medical research, including on possible vaccines, but the Chinese authorities said the laboratory had to be closed down for “rectification.”

Edward Wong contributed reporting.

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Pompeo says 'enormous evidence' virus came from Wuhan lab
AFP (05/04/20)

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Sunday that there was "enormous evidence" that the coronavirus pandemic originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says there is "enormous evidence" that the new coronavirus originated in a lab in Wuhan, China

"There is enormous evidence that this is where it began," he said on ABC's "This Week."

But while highly critical of China's handling of the matter, Pompeo declined to say whether he thought the virus had been intentionally released.

President Donald Trump has been increasingly critical of China's role in the pandemic, which has infected nearly 3.5 million people and killed more than 240,000 around the world. 

He has insisted that Beijing recklessly concealed important information about the outbreak and demanded that Beijing be held "accountable." 

News reports say Trump has tasked US spies to find out more about the origins of the virus, at first blamed on a Wuhan market selling exotic animals like bats, but now thought possibly to be from a virus research laboratory nearby.

Pompeo, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told ABC that he agreed with a statement Thursday from the US intelligence community in which it concurred "with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified."

But he went further than Trump, in citing "significant" and "enormous" evidence that the virus originated in a Wuhan  laboratory.

"I think the whole world can see now, remember, China has a history of infecting the world and running substandard laboratories," Pompeo said.

He said early Chinese efforts to downplay the coronavirus amounted to "a classic Communist disinformation effort. That created enormous risk."

"President Trump is very clear: we'll hold those responsible accountable." 

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NIH director: ‘No way of knowing’ if coronavirus escaped from Wuhan lab
By Zachary Brennan, Politico (05/27/20)

National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said the coronavirus is “absolutely not" manmade but he could not rule out the idea that it escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, where the first known cases emerged.

National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.

“Whether [the coronavirus] could have been in some way isolated and studied in this laboratory in Wuhan, we have no way of knowing,” he told POLITICO on Wednesday.

What is clear, he said, is that "Nature created this virus, and has proven once again to be the most effective bioterrorist."

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have repeatedly suggested that the virus may have somehow emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology — claims that the center’s director has called “pure fabrication.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed late last month that the government is investigating the pandemic’s origin, but said that there is no reason to believe that the coronavirus was manmade or genetically modified.

Collins refused to comment on his agency’s recent — and controversial — decision to pull funding from researchers studying how coronaviruses spread from bats to people. In late April the NIH told the EcoHealth Alliance, whose collaborators included scientists at the Wuhan virology lab, that its project did not “align with the program goals and agency priorities.”

Prominent scientific societies and 77 Nobel laureates have asked the administration to investigate why the non-profit group’s grant was terminated, alleging that the decision was made for political, rather than scientific, reasons. The NIH awards grants using a merit-based system in which researchers evaluate the work of their peers, and ending a grant early is unusual.

Collins, who had not previously commented publicly on the situation, told POLITICO that “the NIH cannot discuss individual grants.”

The agency chief, who is leading a public-private partnership called ACTIV to hunt for coronavirus vaccines and drugs, said that if “all goes perfectly,” a few million doses of vaccine could be available in October for high-risk groups — with doses available sometime next winter for the rest of the country.

Trump has repeatedly promised a vaccine by the end of the year, far faster than any has ever been developed for any condition.

If China develops a coronavirus vaccine before the U.S. does, Collins said he “seriously hopes” that any tensions between the countries “wouldn’t be a dominant factor” in determining whether the U.S. would have access to a Chinese-made shot.

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Inside the Wuhan lab at the center of the coronavirus storm

Janis Mackey Frayer and Denise Chow and Dawn Liu and Ken Dilanian and Abigail Williams and Dan De Luce, NBC News (08/10/20)

WUHAN, China — Cloistered off a major thoroughfare, the Wuhan Institute of Virology could pass for a college campus, its red brick buildings distinguishable from their busy surroundings only by a long, imposing driveway lined with cameras, with a security guard standing sentry.

Add caption

On the neatly manicured grounds beside a small man-made lake is a newer structure with silver sidings and few windows. This, the institute's BSL-4 lab — the first in China to receive the highest level of biosafety clearance — stands at the center of an international firestorm of recrimination over China's role in the coronavirus pandemic.

On Friday, NBC News became the first foreign news organization to be granted access to the institute since the outbreak began, meeting with senior scientists working to pinpoint the origins of the virus. The Wuhan institute and its scientists have become the focus of intense speculation and conspiracy theories — some emanating from the White House — about China's alleged efforts to downplay the outbreak's severity and whether the virus leaked from the facility.

During the roughly five-hour visit, which included a tour of the BSL-4 lab, where technicians clad in bubblelike protective suits handled small vials and other equipment while sealed inside a thick-walled glass enclosure, Wang Yanyi, director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said she and others felt unfairly targeted. She urged that politics not cloud investigations into how the coronavirus spilled over into humans.

Wuhan Institute of Virology

"It is unfortunate that we have been targeted as a scapegoat for the origin of the virus," she said. "Any person would inevitably feel very angry or misunderstood being subject to unwarranted or malicious accusations while carrying out research and related work in the fight against the virus."

The first clusters of a pneumonia-like illness were reported in December in Wuhan, a sprawling city of 11 million people that hugs the Yangtze River in China's central Hubei province.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, founded in the 1950s, is a prominent research facility that enjoyed an even more elevated profile after it opened the BSL-4 lab in 2015. These days, scientists at the lab are focused on the coronavirus, but normally, work at the facility includes research on some of the most dangerous known viruses, including the Ebola, Nipah and Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever viruses.

It is partly because the Wuhan institute is equipped to study the world's highest-risk infectious agents and toxins — including those, like the latest coronavirus, that are believed to have originated in bats — that it is entangled in accusations that it had something to do with the outbreak.

During a White House event on April 30, President Donald Trump referred to a possible link. When asked whether he had seen evidence that suggested that the virus originated at the Wuhan lab, Trump responded: "Yes, I have."

“I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that,” he said when declining to give specifics.

The White House has shown no credible proof to back up claims that the coronavirus was either manufactured at or accidentally leaked from the lab, and neither have any other sources. But Trump continues to fuel the blame, often through racist rhetoric, by regularly referring to the pathogen as the "China virus," the "Wuhan virus" or "kung flu."

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has repeated similar claims, also without providing proof.

In April, current and former U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News that the U.S. intelligence community was examining whether the virus emerged accidentally from the Wuhan lab. Spy agencies had ruled out that the coronavirus was man-made, the officials said at the time.

Democrats in Congress who have asked administration officials to provide information about any such associations say their requests have been ignored.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this story.

‘Zero evidence’

At the beginning of the tour of the institute, a guard took the team’s temperatures and checked bags and equipment. In the facilities, workers wore regular clothes and facemasks, which have become ubiquitous in China during the pandemic.

Trees dot the hilly landscape along the path leading to the institute’s BSL-4 lab, which NBC News was given access to — although not in to the germ-free inner area.

During separate 50-minute interviews accompanied by a representative of the government, Wang and Yuan Zhiming, vice director of the institute, strongly denied that the virus could have originated at the institute. They also said scientists at the facility obtained their first samples of the coronavirus after the disease had begun to spread among the public.

"I have repeatedly emphasized that it was on Dec. 30 that we got contact with the samples of SARS-like pneumonia or pneumonia of unknown cause sent from the hospital," Yuan said. "We have not encountered the novel coronavirus before that, and without this virus, there is no way that it is leaked from the lab."

Wang said none of the institute's scientists contracted the virus, which she said made it extremely unlikely that the pathogen could have escaped from the facility.

NBC News was not able to verify her statements on when the lab first received live samples of the virus or whether any of its scientists were sickened by it.

Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York City-based nonprofit dedicated to studying and preventing pandemics, worked with the Wuhan institute for 16 years until the U.S. government cut funding this year. He also rejected the idea that the virus could have leaked from the lab.

"The fact that they published the sequence so quickly suggests to me that they weren't trying to cover up anything," he said.

There is "absolutely zero evidence that it escaped from a lab," he added.

In May, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci, told National Geographic that he discounted the idea that the virus had accidentally escaped from a lab.

Yuan said that regular health checks are conducted for the facility's personnel but that so far the institute has not encountered positive tests for the virus or its antibodies, which would suggest that a person had the virus at some point.

 Janis Mackey Frayer tours the Wuhan Institute of Virology with Dr. Yuan Zhiming, Director of Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory

Wang and Yuan also challenged an internal State Department cable from 2018 that raised concerns by U.S. Embassy officials in China over the safety and training of staff members at the institute.

The contents of the cable were leaked this year and were subsequently released following a freedom of information request by The Washington Post. The officials said they observed "a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory."

Wang disputed the conclusions. She said U.S. officials did visit the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but in March 2018 — about two months after the Jan. 19, 2018, cable was sent. She added that the officials did not tour any of the labs at the facility and that they did not discuss biosafety procedures.

Wang's and Yuan's comments echo those of other Chinese officials who insist that instead of being criticized, China should be praised for efforts to contain and now identify the virus. But the arguments are undermined by the Chinese government's history of exerting control over scientific data and what many critics see as the country's lack of transparency during the pandemic.

The State Department did not respond directly to Wang and Yuan’s claims that U.S. officials had not visited the lab before the January cable. A spokesperson did say the “Chinese government has yet to sufficiently share data or samples, with the international community.”

“We still don't have the answers we need about a virus that has left 700,000 dead,” they said. “For the world to have those answers, Beijing must provide open and transparent access to full information needed to allow for a complete understanding of the origins of the virus.”

Wang said the institute will "fully support" the World Health Organization, which has dispatched a team in China to interview scientists in Wuhan and develop a framework to investigate the origin of the coronavirus. She also called for more international collaboration, but China and the U.S. remain at political loggerheads — tensions that escalated in 2018 with trade disputes, then sharpened a year later over China's Xinjiang policy and the protests in Hong Kong, and were further aggravated by the pandemic.

In April, the National Institutes of Health terminated funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for a research collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance. The long-term project aimed to identify areas at risk for emerging infectious diseases and to collect and study bat samples to prevent future coronavirus outbreaks. Yuan said the institute was not given a reason for the cancellation of the grant.

The National Institutes of Health did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

A mysterious pneumonia

About eight months into a pandemic that has killed more than 720,000 people and brought the world's economy to its knees, precisely where and when the virus emerged remains a mystery.

The first unexplained cases of a pneumonia-like illness were reported to the WHO's office in Beijing on Dec. 31, and detailed information about the "viral pneumonia of unknown cause" was provided Jan. 3, according to the WHO.

Trump has accused the WHO of failing to adequately warn the world about the coronavirus outbreak, saying in May that its actions as a "puppet of China" allowed the pandemic to spiral out of control. Later that month, he announced that the U.S. would pull its funding for the agency.

The timeline of events early on in the coronavirus outbreak has come under intense scrutiny, including whether China acted quickly enough to alert the WHO of evidence that the virus was being transmitted between humans. Local authorities have been criticized for downplaying the threat to the public and being slow to impose lockdown measures in Wuhan, which went into effect Jan. 23.

Dr. Li Wenliang.

Reports also emerged that the Chinese government had suppressed information about the coronavirus, going so far as to have police punish a 34-year-old doctor named Li Wenliang after he warned about the virus in a chat group on the messaging app WeChat in late December.

Li died of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, on Feb. 7. The government later conducted an investigation, took disciplinary measures against the police officers involved and posthumously hailed Li as a “martyr.”

And despite the country's experience with SARS, another type of coronavirus that emerged in China in 2003 before spreading to four other countries, Chinese authorities have been accused of not doing enough to stem the trade of exotic wildlife, which can harbor so-called zoonotic diseases that can hop from animals into humans.

‘Wet market' a focus

Early research suggests that this virus closely resembles a known coronavirus harbored in horseshoe bats, but teasing out its origin — and what intermediate animal, if any, it passed through before infecting humans — will likely be a long, complicated process.

Some of the first reported cases were traced to the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, a "wet market" where outdoor stalls sell a variety of meat, seafood and live animals for consumption. Public health officials have warned that these types of live-animal markets can be hotbeds of emerging infectious diseases.

Yuan, the Wuhan institute's vice director, said scientists have not yet found a smoking gun linking the emergence of the pathogen to the market.

"So far, there is no evidence to show that the novel coronavirus jumped from animals to people in Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan," he said, adding that it is not yet clear "how it jumped from the natural or immediate hosts to humans in the early stages, from what animal and when and how the spillover happened."

The Huanan Seafood Market was shuttered Jan. 1, and although scientists with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention were reported to have gathered samples from the site, most of the data have not been made public, further fueling suspicions of Chinese motives and actions.

The closed Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where some of the first reported cases were traced to.

Scientists can glean information about a virus from its genetic material, but a pathogen's molecular makeup will not reveal everything about its source. The Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in sequencing the coronavirus' genome, and Chinese researchers published the results Jan. 12.

The virus' genome revealed it to be a new pathogen, but there were marked similarities between this coronavirus and one from a bat sample that was collected in 2013 in Yunnan province. The genomes of the coronaviruses were found to be 96.2 percent alike, but the differences are crucial, said Shi Zhengli, a prominent bat researcher who directs the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan institute.

Based on the two sequences, it would take more than 1,100 mutations for the virus isolated in the 2013 sample to evolve into the strain of coronavirus that is spreading around the world, she said in written responses.

The WHO has maintained that the coronavirus was likely harbored in animals. And the authors of a study published in March in the journal Nature said it is "improbable" that the pathogen emerged as a result of lab-based manipulations of a related coronavirus. About a month before that paper was released, 27 public health scientists from nine countries signed a statement in the medical journal The Lancet supporting their colleagues in China and pushing back against misinformation surrounding the pandemic.

The U.S. decision this year to terminate funding for EcoHealth Alliance's bat research also sent ripples of alarm through the scientific community — a feeling Daszak, its president, said he shared.

"Cutting off our relationship with scientists on the ground, the places where these pandemics start, is absolutely the wrong thing to do," he said.

Photographs of the lab’s construction and opening — a collaboration with France — decorate one wall leading to the secure lab at the institute. The lab technicians were trained in Lyon, France, and at least two of them trained in Galveston, Texas, Yuan said.

So it is perhaps not a surprise that Yuan lamented that worsening U.S.-China relations were hurting scientific collaboration and said the world would be better off with more and not less cooperation.

"We don't want to see the tension between China and the U.S., because it is not good for the scientific development. It is not good for the progress and stability of the world," he said.

"We have learned a lot from the American scientists in terms of their scientific technology, spirit and relevant experience," he said, adding, "During this pandemic, I think we still need to believe in science, respect science and trust the scientists."

government later conducted investigation, took disciplinary measures against the police officers involved and posthumously hailed Li as a “martyr”.