Chinese lab conducted extensive research on deadly bat viruses, but there is no evidence of accident [View all]
Source: MSN
For nearly a decade, a team of scientists from Wuhan, China, crisscrossed southern Asia in a high-stakes search for bats and the strange diseases they harbor. They crawled through caves, catching the razor-toothed mammals with nets and scooping up liters of their excrement. They trapped insects and mice living near bat roosts and collected blood from villagers who hunt bats for food or folk medicine.
They returned to their state-of-the-art laboratory in central China with tubes and vials containing known killers — pathogens associated with diseases that are deadly in humans — and also a few surprises. On multiple occasions, their takings included exotic coronaviruses previously unknown to science.
The highlights of the Wuhan researchers’ work on bat viruses are spelled out in more than 40 published studies and academic papers that describe a sprawling, ambitious effort to document the connection between bats and recent disease outbreaks in China. The experiments were intended to illuminate how dangerous pathogens sometimes jump from animal hosts to humans. But experts say the research also carried an implicit risk: the possibility that the lab itself could facilitate the spread of the very diseases the scientists were trying to prevent.
On Thursday, the U.S. intelligence community released an assessment formally concluding that the virus behind the covid-19 pandemic originated in China. While asserting that the pathogen was not man-made or genetically altered, the statement pointedly declined to rule out the possibility that virus had escaped from the complex of laboratories in Wuhan that has been at the forefront of global research into bat-borne viruses linked to multiple epidemics over the past decade.
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/chinese-lab-conducted-extensive-research-on-deadly-bat-viruses-but-there-is-no-evidence-of-accidental-release/ar-BB13rxpf?li=BBnb7Kz
So, China has a lab that studies zoonotic diseases like the CDC does and should, because such diseases like the Swine Flu, Bird Flu, etc., can lead to pandemics as explained by the CDC:
https://www.cdc.gov/ncezid/pdf/infectious-diseases-brochure-2017.pdf
The CDC itself has the "National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID)," which "works to protect people at home and around the world from emerging and zoonotic infections ranging from A to Z—anthrax to Zika. We are living in an interconnected world where an outbreak of infectious disease is just a plane ride away."
But by taking steps to respond to such a disease, the Trump administration is raising a series of conspiracy theories that China invented the COVID-19? This is sort of like Republicans blaming Democrats for the economic damage of COVID-19 and encouraging people to protest stay at home orders designed to protect the public health, which just endangers more people.
Up is down. Left is right.
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