The Chinese Foreign Ministry has said the Wuhan Virology Lab deserves the Nobel Prize in Medicine for its role in researching COVID-19 after the pandemic first broke out in Wuhan city in late 2019.
At a press conference Thursday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhau Lijian responded to allegations that the lab itself was responsible for the pandemic, on allegations that were either deliberately made and spread or that a leak in the facility caused the outbreak.
“If those who first publish high quality viral genomes were accused of making the virus, then Prof. Luc Montagnier, who first discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), would be considered the culprit of AIDS and not be awarded the Nobel Prize , and Mr. Louis Pasteur, who discovered microbes, would be held responsible for the disease-causing bacteria around the world, “Lijian said.” By analogy, the Wuhan team should be awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their research on COVID-19 instead of being criticized. “
The statement comes when the Wuhan Virology Laboratory was listed as a candidate for the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement Prize 2021 for its role in identifying the pathogenesis of COVID-19, according to Chinese state media in the Outlet Global Times .
The theory that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab has been around since the beginning of the pandemic but has been readily dismissed by experts. Now, however, some experts say that this layoff may have been premature, which brings the issue back to the fore. As early as April, 18 scientists wrote a letter in Science Magazine demanding a more detailed study of the exact origins of the virus, this time taking the laboratory into account. Despite major calls for an investigation, Shi Zhengli, the “bat woman” virologist at the Wuhan lab who has been the focus of many conspiracies, dismissed the allegations in a recent interview with The New York Times.
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if (window.location.pathname.indexOf (“656089”)! = -1) {console.log (“hedva connatix”); document.getElementsByClassName (“divConnatix”)[0].style.display = “none”;} It is generally accepted that the virus originally came from bats, which are known to harbor several contagious diseases, many of which are zoonotic – that is, they can pass from animal to People are transmitted. Coronaviruses, one of which, SARS-CoV-2, causes COVID-19, are a family of viruses known to be harbored by bats. A recent study on bats in Switzerland confirmed this again by tracing numerous virus families back to flying mammals, including zoonotic pathogens, many of which, however, could only be transmitted to humans after transmission from bats to another animal. It was widely believed that COVID-19 was one such pathogen that was transmitted from bats to humans through another animal, although it remains a mystery which animal it was and exactly how it was.
Aaron Reich contributed to this report.
