Fox News quoted a number of sources as saying on April 15 that the U.S. government suspected that the new coronavirus was accidentally leaked due to lax security measures of Wuhan Virus Research Institute. When answering Fox's question on the same day, President trump said that the United States government was conducting a thorough investigation. On April 16, foreign media reporters raised questions on the issue at a regular press conference of the Ministry of foreign affairs of the people's Republic of China. Spokesman Zhao Lijian responded that China's position on the source and transmission route of the new coronavirus is clear. We always believe that this is a scientific issue and should be studied by scientists and medical experts.
When novel coronavirus pneumonia swept across the globe, individual Western politicians began to preach all kinds of viral conspiracy theories for a political purpose. "The new coronavirus was leaked from Wuhan virus" is one of them. In this regard, Wang Yanyi, director of Wuhan virus Institute, responded to a series of related problems in an exclusive interview with cgtn.
New coronavirus has never been exposed, studied or preserved before the outbreak
Novel coronavirus from bat was discovered in an article in the April issue of nature in April. The virus was found at the Wuhan Institute. Did the virus trigger the outbreak?
Wang Yanyi: this statement is totally out of thin air. Wuhan virus Institute was first exposed to the virus on December 30 last year, when it was still a clinical sample called "unexplained pneumonia". Later, after pathogen testing, we found that these samples actually contained a completely unknown coronavirus, which is now known as the new coronavirus.
We have never been exposed to, studied or preserved before. In fact, we, like everyone else, do not know the existence of this virus. How to leak something that doesn't exist?
Novel coronavirus from bat was discovered in an article in the April issue of nature in April. The virus was found at the Wuhan Institute. Did the virus trigger the outbreak?
Wang Yanyi: actually, novel coronavirus has been discovered in many coronavirus just now. For example, MERS virus in Middle East respiratory syndrome, virus in this paper of 2018 nature, and the new crown virus of 2019. But in fact, the virus in the 2018 paper is not the virus that caused the new epidemic. The virus mainly caused diarrhea and death of piglets. It was later named sads. The similarity between the virus and the genome of Xinguan was only 50%, and the difference was huge.
Novel coronavirus, RaTG-13, was discovered in February this year. The similarity between this virus and the new coronavirus was 96.2%. In the eyes of ordinary people, the similarity of 96.2% is very high. Is it possible that the new coronavirus is from this bat virus?
The difference of 3.8% corresponds to the difference of more than 1100 loci. In nature, it takes a long time for virus to accumulate such a quantitative mutation through natural evolution.
Edward Holmes, a leading researcher on virus evolution in the world, recently made a statement that it would take about 50 years for ratg-13 to evolve into a new crown in nature. The different number of more than 1100 sites is already very large, and these sites just need to be corresponding to the corresponding sites of the new coronavirus. It is just right that these 1100 sites are mutated and are just about to become the appearance of new coronavirus. This probability can be said to be very small.
Many people may have a misunderstanding: since Wuhan virus has reported the similarity between ratg-13 and new coronavirus genome, Wuhan virus has this virus. But in fact, this is not the case. We only know the sequence information of ratg-13 virus in the process of sequencing bat samples, but we have not isolated and obtained the live ratg-13 virus, so there is no possibility of leakage of ratg-13.
Cgtn: we've been working on coronaviruses. Aren't there any live viruses in our library? What kind of virus library is this?
Wang Yanyi: some research teams of Wuhan virus Institute, such as Shi Zhengli's team, have been engaged in the research on bat (SARS like) coronavirus since 2004, but their research has been carried out around the theme of tracing the source of SARS.
Over the years, Mr. Shi and Mr. Shi have indeed isolated and obtained some bat coronaviruses. At present, there are three strains. However, 96% of the three strains had the highest similarity with SARS, but no more than 79.8% had the highest similarity with the new coronavirus.
Cgtn: after the outbreak of the new coronavirus, what work have we done to trace the source of the new coronavirus?
There is a consensus in the international academic community on what the source of the virus is, that it should come from a wild animal in nature.
But what kind of virus do we carry in the world's wide range of wild animals? Where is the virus with high similarity to the new crown? There is no clear answer. That's why this question needs the cooperation of scientists all over the world to answer. So in the final analysis, the issue of traceability is still a scientific issue, which requires scientists to make judgments with scientific data and facts.