In a rare glimpse inside a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan amid global suspicions about the COVID-19 pandemic, scenes from the “secretive” Institute of Virology have sent shockwaves over the internet.
According to Mail Online, pictures from inside the laboratory show a broken seal on the door of one of the refrigerators used to hold 1,500 different strains of virus, including the bat coronavirus that has jumped to humans with over 2.4 million infections and over 165,000 deaths since the first case in November last year.
The pictures, first released by a state-owned Chinese newspaper in 2018, were also published on Twitter last month, before being deleted.
Meanwhile, according to New York Post, the director of the lab denies that the bug accidentally spread from his facility.
“There’s no way this virus came from us,” Yuan Zhiming, director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, told state media.
Yuan admitted that the lab is studying “different areas related to the coronavirus,” but told the English-language state broadcaster CGTN that none of his staff has been infected.
“As people who carry out viral studies we clearly know what kind of research is going on at the institute and how the institute manages viruses and samples,” he said.
He said that since the lab is in Wuhan “people can’t help but make associations”, but claimed that some media outlets are “deliberately trying to mislead people”.
But officials in the past have raised concerns over the safety conditions of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In March 2018, US science diplomats dispatched to the lab issued two “sensitive” diplomatic cables about inadequate safety measures at the lab, the Washington Post reported, citing intelligence sources.
The first cable warned the experiments conducted in the lab on coronavirus in bats “represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic,” according to the report.
The cable, written by two US-China embassy officials, said there is a “serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory,” according to the report.
