Was COVID-19 made inside a Chinese lab? | Under Investigation

Tonight is one of the greatest mysteries we have ever faced. Where did the deadly virus that destroyed the world come from? Did it really emerge in a bat-infested copper mine eight years ago in remote southwestern China, where three men working there died of a disease almost identical to Covet 19, and what happened to the infected human blood samples when they were brought here to a laboratory in Wuhan, in the city at the center of the covert crisis, what are the possibilities and where the answers are, has been the forbidden question, but does the world have the right to ask if covert 19 came from a laboratory? night as the world health organization prepares to release its report on the origins of the virus?

We will investigate pandemic bats. It's where we start. Yes, the cover-up claims. and conspiracy of opportunism and revenge and condemnation the china virus the china plague tungs lou has china been unjustly condemned or has it known the truth about the virus all along? the independent expert came to study the origins of the kobe 19 virus has completed his trip To China, good evening, I'm Liz Hayes and this is under

investigation

. I'll be joined tonight by Mary Louise McClause, professor of epidemiology at the University of New South Wales, advisor to the World Health Organization on infection prevention and control, if this has leaked from the laboratory. you have to see what his transmissibility was jason yatsen lee successful australian businessman and human rights lawyer is the son of immigrants from hong kong it's literally like we were building the death star bates gill professor of asia pacific security studies at macquarie university undercover 19 simply intensified what was already in motion china suspicions and china suspicions by west jackson rhine doctor and cnet global science editor the world's largest technology website was it mind-blowing to you that this research existed ? yes, i don't think many people know about this, i'm very disturbed, nikolai petrovsky, professor of medicine at flinders university, who is working on a covert vaccine but has also done research that he says indicates that the virus It came from a laboratory, why?

Did the world not take this seriously because they were misinformed and we are joined from Shanghai by Professor Chen Hong, director of Australian studies at East China Normal University? I think it is quite unfair to say that China was deliberately hiding the facts, thank you all. Congratulations on joining us. I'll start with you, Nikolai, do you think this virus could very well have come from a laboratory? We cannot exclude a laboratory origin of the virus. It is possible that it came from a zoonotic transmission from an animal to a human, but it is equally plausible that it came from an accidental leak of a virus that was being grown in a laboratory.

Here you have two competing theories: Nikolai talks about an accidental escape or an accidental jump. from a bat to an intermediate species to a human being in both cases I still think it is accidental the great debate on the origin of the virus that is dividing the scientific and political world begins in a remote abandoned copper mine in southwest China eight years ago years, where a coronavirus very similar to the one that causes covert 19 was found in bats. It is 2012. The abandoned mine is near the small town of Tugun, deep in the Yuan province of southwestern China.

The men who work there are unaware of the bats that populate the mine and the bat feces they were shoveling. It contained an unknown coronavirus that would later be called ratg. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that attack the upper respiratory tract. About two weeks after entering the mine, the miners fell ill with a strange flu-like illness, these medical records showed. Chinese kept secret for years. His symptoms were identical to those of covert 19. The symptoms of the infection they contracted in that mind were things like a dry cough, there were high fevers, the dr. jonathan latham is executive director of the bioscience resources project in new york, all of those symptoms we would recognize today as symptoms of

covid

19, you know, they are quite diagnostic, if you showed up in a hospital or in a doctor's office with those symptoms, you would would have been identified as a coveted patient, three of the six infected miners died, one remained in hospital for five months before succumbing to the strange disease, according to research by Dr. latham, it took enough time for the bat virus infecting the sick minor to mutate into a coronavirus that was now capable of transmitting to other humans, that scientists began to wonder if these men were the first victims of covert 198. years before it broke out in Wuhan, what we suggest is that the time these miners were in the hospital they were basically incubating this virus for a long time and that gave the virus a chance to evolve to adapt to human lungs.

Blood samples from the dying miners were sent to China's highest-security biological laboratory, 1,500 kilometers to the north, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They did tests that they sent to the Wuhan Institute of Biology, which came back positive for a coronavirus and samples of the coronavirus were taken from the back. of the feces in the mine were also taken to the Wuhan laboratory. Comparison tests would later reveal that 96 matched 19 coverts. The virus that first struck in Wuhan in December 2019. Very simple data elements on the ground point to the likelihood that this virus came from a laboratory as the world searches for answers about the origins of the virus, which once was dismissed as a conspiracy theory has become a legitimate scientific debate, is it possible that covert 19 already existed and was being investigated and accidentally escaped from the laboratory?

The Wuhan laboratory caused the pandemic, but it is a debate that many scientists reject. The lab-based scenarios are all conspiracy theories because they propose that there is a scientist somewhere and not just one scientist, but a group of scientists who are covering up that is the essence of a conspiracy. theory dr. Robert Gary, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Tulane School of Medicine in New Orleans, agrees that there is evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was conducting research on the bat coronavirus called Ratg13 and on samples from the dead miners, but says it is scientifically impossible that the bat virus mutated to 19 undercover either in the laboratory or in the bodies of dying miners the theory of life in the rit g13 somehow evolved in some of the minors that they got sick is also not feasible, it is not possible that would take approximately 50 years of natural evolution, the way to think about this is to say if all the evidence that was in favor of a laboratory leak was in favor of a natural origin and the amount of evidence that there was in favor of a natural origin was on the From the side of a laboratory leak there would be no disagreement about what happened here.

Nikolai's Bats is where we start. Yes, we know these coronaviruses are in bats, so how did it get from a bat to a human? A virus that is optimized to infect a bat. is not optimized to infect a human so frequently that it will come through intermediary species for cloaking 19. There is no evidence of an animal standing between us and bats and that is why you feel there are compelling reasons to feel that comes from a laboratory. I think it would be a mistake to close one line of that questioning and say that the conspiracy theory only leaves us with the only possibility that it came from an animal.

As scientists, we have to explore both possibilities until we can at least exclude one and I can't do that now. What we do know is that the miners appeared to have antibodies against the coronavirus, but it does not say which coronavirus. Can I also say that that was the cause of his death? your infection because you can get antibodies because you've been exposed, but that doesn't mean you have a disease, except in this case, I mean, you know, I've read the medical thesis and I guess I'm a doctor too and what's described there both the symptoms of the patient the course of the disease his biochemistry and serology say that these miners were infected with a coronavirus we are stopped by the police who are stalking us this is a system that does not care about the questions, the attempts to The international journalists who visited the copper mine in China have been thwarted, this only increases suspicions that the authorities there do not want outsiders to investigate this highly controversial theory at the time the ratg-13 bat virus was found in the copper mine, the safest laboratory in the world. china for the study and containment of viruses was the wuhan institute of virology, it was and still is headed by xi jiangli, known as the bat woman due to her work with bat diseases and who has confirmed that she took samples of the virus from copper strip. study in Wuhan, but it is the type of research that was being carried out here that draws attention and adds weight to the theory that covert 19 came from this laboratory, it involved the manipulation of viruses for research, which the

made

it incredibly dangerous.

Queen McIntyre is a professor of global biosafety research at the University of New South Wales. She says the bat virus that infected miners at the copper mine could have been deliberately mutated into 19 undercover through the controversial and risky technique. of research called gain of function engineering, genetic engineering of a pathogen can be done in different ways one way of doing it is called gain of function research, which is where you pass the virus through an animal host over and over again, so you're basically accelerating nature, it's like accelerating evolution by hundreds or thousands of years, that's you know, a well established technique, xi jiang li, has confirmed that she and her team carried out gain of function engineering in bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology Nikolai gain-of-function engineering for the layman, so essentially we take a virus that we consider a potential threat, say, bird flu viruses, we know that the Spanish flu that killed potentially hundreds of millions of people in 1918 came from a bird virus that was transmitted to humans, so we have many other influenza and bird viruses that do not. cross into humans, so the idea here is to try to create one that does, essentially we collect an influenza virus from current birds that is not causing a pandemic and now we try to insert genetic characteristics into that virus that would now allow it because the pandemic human scientifically I mean, what is the gain?

What's good about that? Well, the gain is understanding that the enemy viruses that exist in nature are our enemy, so the idea here is that by studying the enemy and even manipulating it to see how it could be even stronger, maybe that will help us defend against the enemy. There are some who say that the risk is that now we have created something that did not exist in nature, which is a highly lethal human virus, and if that were to leak, I have devastation, this is like a really important issue in general, not just in around the coronavirus.

I saw Jason shake his head like it's like it's mind-blowing to you that this

investigation

is going on, yeah. I don't think many people know about this. I am very concerned about this continuing and I don't think it should continue because it is inherently dangerous. If we are designing a virus that could wipe out humanity, it is literally like We are building the death star and if something goes wrong then everyone dies. I mean, I find it shocking. I think it will work as engineering. This engineering is horrible in your mind and mine too. That's bad.

Isn't it like that in Western laboratories? it was banned in the united states, now it was actually introduced interestingly when it was banned in the united states, the research was actually moved to the wuhan institute of virology because it wasn't banned in china and in fact at one point , the United States The government was funding the gain of function research that we have seen published by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but it is a fact that it is currently legal to do this research in most countries in the world. The wet market is the origin of the pandemic investigated by the Wuhan laboratory.

This is not an independent organization or an independent investigation and a scientific debate closed by the denier in chief. There is nothing positive in what happened in China. If we can discredit it, so to speak. that we can debunk it for many other things that remain under investigation: A coronavirus found in bats in a remote Chinese copper mine kills three miners in 2012. Their disease is eerily similar to Covet 19. The virus samplesThey are studied in the city's biohazard laboratory. where the pandemic first broke out, wuhan, the wuhan lab has been conducting highly risky research designed to genetically engineer highly lethal human viruses so they can be studied, it's literally like we're building the death star, so they could have leaked accidentally 19 from this laboratory.

I cannot exclude a laboratory origin of the virus. I think it would be a mistake to close one line of that questioning and say that it is a conspiracy theory. The world health organization, who is the United Nations surveillance body in charge of separating the facts of fiction its final report on the origin of the virus will be released this week, epidemiologist professor at the university of new south wales, mary louise mcclause, is an advisor to who is the laboratory's big problem in trying to determine the possibilities, I guess, isn't it mary louise if this has leaked from the lab, you have to look at what its transmissibility was, how many people it leaked to or it leaked in some kind of cloud to be able to become a huge problem in January, of So that leak would have then caused a huge amount of people to be exposed and it would have had to be covered up yes, it would have had to be covered up, but I don't get the feeling that China wanted to cover it up because they really want to protect their population.

The WHO research team traveled to Wuhan earlier this year and included Australian professor Dominic Dwyer when I spoke to him while he was in Wuhan he said he believed the lab was definitely part of his mission. You go with an open mind and follow the science. Does that open mind include ruling out or ruling out a Wuhan lab leak? The lab leak is a very reasonable hypothesis because it is This happened before throughout history and in many countries, so these things can happen, so you have to see what kind of leak it was, it was one of the viruses that they had in the lab and was accidentally transmitted or perhaps there was a more sinister investigation. and so on, everyone is being considered.

What would you consider a failure? What would you say the problem will be if you leave there without feeling like you've accomplished what you needed to? I think that would be failure. If we didn't get the information we asked for, I think the failure is if we don't get the cooperation that we, as a group of experts, think we need. If it is ultimately rejected, then that would be a problem on February 9 after just two weeks. the ground in wuhan whose team leader peter ben embarak initially announced that the lab leak theory would not be investigated it was highly unlikely that anything could escape from such a place the origin of the virus is now considered political dynamite and the wh has been charged Having a history of not wanting to upset China, that opinion was not helped when at the same press conference Chinese scientists were allowed to promote the widely discredited claim that covert 19 was brought to China in a frozen state II may persist in the conditions found in frozen food packaging and In this case, by cultivating products that indicate that it can be transported over long distances in training products, the reaction of many was to call Who's mission a cover-up and later some scientists The Wuhan team reported deep frustrations in their attempts to obtain detailed data from Wuhan. institute of virology, but less than a week later, in a complete turnaround, the head of the WHO, Dr Tedris Cabrasus, went public stating that all theories about the origin of the virus would be investigated for his final report.

I wish to confirm that all hypotheses remain open. and they require further analysis and study and we will continue to work to obtain the information we need to answer the questions that still need to be answered what would you like whose team to be able to achieve? Well, I would like them to be able to obtain essentially all of the lab books and records from the various committees within the institute that would describe exactly what the experiments were performed and what viruses they were handling and I think to be totally transparent, that's what I would like to see. that they have free and unlimited access to let's make a quick comment here about who, I very much agree that that is the type of research that should be done, but even if there is unrestricted access, etc., and the months it will take to do this type of research.

At the end of the day there is an examination of who is owned and operated by the sovereign states of the United Nations, one of which is China and a very important one, so what concerns me is that the word independent simply it's not really accurate this is not an independent organization nor an independent research professor chen maybe i should bring it here do you agree that wuhan lab should be a place where we can go in and investigate just to solve this kind of questions? things like China trying to prevent the world from accessing the virulent cheaters institute or full openness to China, everything is open.

I must make it clear that there is enormous scientific support for the theory that the coronavirus occurred naturally and passed from bats. another animal, possibly a pangolin transported to Wuhan and then

made

the jump to humans at a wet market where wildlife is sold for food, but what is puzzling to scientists is that many of the first 19 victims are now known to have covert actions were not related to the market. In Wuhan, where the virus was first thought to have emerged, I do not believe the wet market is the origin of the pandemic because the first two cases had not been in the Wuhan cluster wet market and half of the cases in that group had not been to the wet market and, despite extensive testing, no trace of the covert virus 19 was found in the animals that were sold at the market.

They went to the wet market. They took samples. They took environmental samples, but none of those samples showed a coronavirus. The animals that were sampled at the seafood market Juan, there are no animal samples that we know of that have a size of coronavirus that could be an ancestor of what we see today and that has affected the world essentially, but if the question of how it started the pandemic. was no longer a hostage to global politics when covert 19 hit the United States, decimating New York for the first time. The scientific debate on the origin of the virus was also hijacked by politics by none other than the United States' denier-in-chief due to the

chinese

virus what happened three months ago it seemed like we were in big trouble and we were and I got it back.

The discussion about China's role in the pandemic was distorted and largely derailed by the blame game so enthusiastically imposed by former US President Donald Trump. virus

chinese

plague kung flu doctors would say well, did Trump's rhetoric prevent conversation about any alternative in the world of the covert and how it might have arisen? You absolutely know scientifically, I think the moment Trump blurted out that he had read a report that said this could be a lab leak, I guess the scientific establishment then said well, if Trump said we have to push the opposite agenda to prove that Trump doesn't know what he's talking about, it's possible that Trump doesn't know what he's talking about, but I think there was this counterattack saying well, if we can discredit him for saying we can discredit him for a lot of other things, so it was unfortunate that will even enter the debate.

The unjustified accusation made by the United States based on hearsay evidence against China is irresponsible and ignores the facts and even hides ulterior motives. Science got caught up in politics and everything was seemingly thrown out the window. It is correct to say that because of Trump's ideas. to vocalize the lab league theory as his, he basically pushed all those people to say wait, we have to stop this Trump is going to go on a tangent, start claiming that China is making bioweapons or whatever and the idea of Trump about the leak was linked to an actual legitimate investigation that should be conducted with the lab, there is nothing. positive about what happened in china that has to do with china reacted angrily and seems punitive against anyone who questions it and an example of that is when Australia called for an independent international investigation into the origins of the virus, it would seem completely reasonable and sensible for The The world would like to have an independent assessment of how all this happened.

From China's point of view, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was already in Donald Trump's camp, and his call came on the heels of Trump's incendiary rhetoric. I think there should be an independent investigation. but do you know Australia needed to lead it? How did we do it. I read somewhere that we just got off the phone with Trump and then we made it public, so it looked bad, it seemed like a political setup. I think actually China, you know, people in China feel that Australia has been joining the United States in bullying China, not the other way around.

We repeatedly see many cases where Australia has been initiating uninvited attacks on China as a way of joining forces like I said you know the United States will attack and publicize this attack on China. Somehow this is their fault and they must take responsibility. Secret chambers in Wuhan. Final proof of a cover-up from the beginning. Why didn't the world take this? seriously because they were misinformed that's the next thing that's being investigated because of the chinese virus what happened about three months ago it seemed like we were in big trouble and we were and I was reunited with former president of the united states donald trump almost for It alone derailed any serious scientific debate over the possibility that covert virus 19 had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, even though the lab's chief scientist, Ji Zhang Glee, admitted that her team was studying a virus from closely related bat that killed three miners eight years before the pandemic struck.

After reading the medical thesis and the patient's symptoms, the course of the disease says that these miners were infected with a coronavirus, questions remain about whether the world health organization is the right group to lead an independent investigation into the origin of the hidden word. independent just not really accurate this is not an independent organization or independent research there is also concern about the controversial genetic engineering technique called gain of function that the Wuhan laboratory participated in to create lethal human viruses. I am so disturbed that this continues and I don't think it should continue because we are designing a virus that could wipe out humanity and there is still the question of what the Chinese authorities knew about the disease and when they knew about it, in the West there is an opinion that China covered up or, at best, downplayed the severity of the virus outbreak;

That claim has been vigorously and sometimes angrily denied by China, with some officials saying the suggestion borders on racism, but we have obtained footage filmed in Wuhan that appears to back up an initial cover story. -up by china when the virus took hold in late december 2019 doctors were silenced and disciplined and one of the first to express concern dr. lee weng liang was threatened with arrest and then died from the virus at great personal risk a citizen journalist in wuhan covertly filmed these interviews with high-level medical professionals, they say there was no doubt from the beginning that the virus was spreading from human to human, those doctors reveal that Chinese authorities ordered them to lie about how quickly and easily the virus was spreading and say that authorities allowed Chinese people to celebrate the lunar new year to continue knowing the risks to health. health professor chen from everything we see china downplayed this virus from the beginning do you agree that at the beginning of the outbreak in gohan you know that people were simply caught by surprise and people simply did not understand the nature of the disease virus and nor how it spreads, there was no deliberate top-down attempt to cover it up because at that time China was under this kind of surprise attack from outside and it was totally unknown. virus, there appear to be some harsh examples of those who wanted to speak and were told they could not be warned by being imprisoned.

I have to say that that was also kind of a response from the local level because you know at that time You know people were just panicking so we shouldn't interpret these kinds of acts as some kind of deliberate nefarious act, you know, acts malicious to cover the interesting application. I think we must remember that there are Chinese who are in the ministries. whom I have always found very interested in exactly what is going on, but there may also be lesser officials who do not want to be the bearers of bad news and mayThey also prevented China from talking to who from the beginning, so there are two Chinese, there are the local authorities who did not respond quickly enough and then there are the authorities in Beijing and the local authorities should have acted faster.

I want to take a step back why the world didn't take this seriously because they were misinformed. Don't know. I think you know why Why can I ask where you're going? Are you suggesting that they were misinformed by who about the severity of the virus because of official Chinese government information that was being provided to who and the rest of the world who said? initially this was not a virus transmissible to humans there were only a limited number of cases in woohan now we know that both things were completely wrong that they knew it was transmissible at the same time telling the rest of the world fact that this is not a virus transmissible from person to person, I think it is quite unfair to say that China was deliberately hiding the fact that there was actually a person-to-person infection because it was actually quite timely because the Chinese authorities and also the local authorities The experts actually They were studying the cases, so in reality this is really a step-by-step process to determine the nature of a totally unknown disease.

This is an extremely sensitive issue in China. Because? Because China itself is trying to prove to the people. world that it is a responsible power, that its appearance on the international scene should be seen as legitimate and acceptable, is something that China wants the world to embrace, so you add all that up and you can see why, on the one hand, they would want to be extremely careful and in shaping what the world hears and, on the other hand, being extremely sensitive and defensive, uh, to any implication, any suggestion from the outside that somehow this is their fault, the pandemic for me was a Total failure in the ideal of international cooperation, you know.

It wasn't an alien invasion, but it was something of an alien invasion just where you would think that all the countries in the world would come together and there would be a multinational force to fight the enemy, but instead it didn't happen. What we saw were international disputes pointing to blame shifting due to geopolitics. Add to that Jason that the covert 19th simply escalated what was already in motion, so it basically poured gasoline on that burning fire of an invasion alien and that just exacerbates the whole problem that arises: will we ever know the source of the virus?

Natural accident or was it a laboratory accident. Rarely does someone who committed murder say I did it. The next one in investigation. We begin tonight's debate by asking whether this pandemic could have been caused by a Wuhan lab leak, which until recently was considered a conspiracy theory. And have China's other actions during this last terrible year been rightly condemned or are we guilty of a global blame game? What our experts agree on is that there are legitimate questions the world still needs answers to about the origins of the virus and that includes the role, if any, played by the bat virus that killed three copper miners eight years before. pandemic, there are also legitimate questions about the research carried out by the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its use of controversial genetic engineering that can create deadly viruses within an earth if we are designing. a virus that could wipe out humanity is literally like we are building the death star and if something goes wrong then everyone dies it is yet to be decided whether the world health organization can be trusted which will soon publish its final report on the origin of the virus carry out an independent investigation what worries me is that the word independent is just not really accurate, it is not an independent organization nor an independent investigation and there are still doubts about whether China is as determined as the rest of the world to find out where the virus came from and how it became a pandemic, if the virus is in nature, ultimately we should find it, the longer it takes and we don't find it, the more we have to think that it came from somewhere else similarly, to unless Someone you know raises their hand and says you know my fault.

I was cultivating that virus and it somehow leaked out. We're going to end up with a probability like we have, even in criminal law cases, rarely someone who committed the murder. I say I did it oh look I agree what I don't agree is about the blame on how it was done politically we all want to know what could have happened so we can prevent it because today we will have another pandemic that we have been talking about There are many hypotheses about a leak about the origin of the virus, but mine is the most important thing, I think it is a concrete investigation step by step.

What happened here was accidental. There is no evidence that China attempted to manipulate or liberate. any virus in the population, so we have to think of it as an accident, was it a natural accident or was it a laboratory accident. I don't care how many scientists come forward and say it was this, this is why we have definitive proof that there will be people out there who just won't accept it, eh, and maybe even for geopolitical reasons they won't accept it. do, even if who says, maybe even more, so I would say we may never get to how it really started, but what we have What I really learned is the importance of how to respond.

The real tension in all of this for me is this choice between cooperation and conflict and my hope is that what we can learn from this is that choosing to cooperate is always a better path than choosing to have a big fight over all the issues we have discussed here this evening. There is hope that they will soon be matters of history and that the question of where the virus came from will be less important than how we finally defeated it. Thank you very much to all. for joining me I'm liz hayes good evening hello I'm liz hayes thanks for watching our new series of events under investigation subscribe to our channel now for more great stories from under investigation and 60 minutes from Australia for other exclusive content under investigation visit nine now period com dot a u and app nine now