On February 1, 2020, two Chinese scientists, Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao, one from Wuhan, published the pre-print paper “The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus”, the paper was quickly scrubbed and only available in the web archives. [1, 2]
In the paper they point out that “According to municipal reports and the testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors, the bat was never a food source in the city, and no bat was traded in the market.” They also point out there is no recombination or intermediate host that has been reported.
But they screened the area around the Wuhan seafood market and identified two laboratories conducting research on bat coronavirus:
- the Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention (WHCDC) located ~280 meters, which also happens to be adjacent the Union Hospital where the first group of doctors were infected.
- Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences ~12 kilometers
Of the latter, the “principle investigator participated in a project which generated a chimeric virus using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system, and reported the potential for human emergence.”
From this circumstantial evidence they concluded “the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan. ”
Vanity Fair reported that US National Security Council (NSC) officials sited this pre-print paper said to be published on February 1, 2020 noting that “[a]lmost as soon as the paper appeared on the internet, it disappeared, but not before U.S. government officials took note.” (sec V)
Then on February 19, 2020 a group of 27 public health scientists from eight countries signed an open letter in The Lancet to condemn conspiracy theories surrounding the origin of the virus. The same day the WHO affirms the virus was not produced in a laboratory or as a biological weapon. [3]
In June 2021 an Austalian journalist reported evidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology kept live bats in cages inside their labs, contrary to WHO investigators claiming this was a “conspiracy”!