Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, Dec 5: A US-based scientist who previously worked at a contentious research facility in Wuhan, China, has claimed that COVID-19 was a ‘man-made virus’ that escaped from the establishment.
According to the New York Post, which cited a remark made by US-based researcher Andrew Huff in the British daily The Sun, COVID was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a state-funded and run research centre, two years ago.
Huff is a former vice president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based non-profit organisation that researches infectious diseases, according to the New York Post article.
According to the New York Post, Huff asserts in his book that China’s gain-of-function studies were carried out with insufficient security, leading to a leak at the Wuhan lab.
With both Chinese government officials and lab staff disputing that the virus originated there, the Wuhan lab has been the focus of contentious discussions on the origins of COVID.
“Foreign laboratories did not have the adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, ultimately resulting in the lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Andrew Huff, said in his book.
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The organisation has established tight relations with the Wuhan lab and has been researching various coronaviruses in bats for more than ten years with support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The NIH is the main US government organisation in charge of biological and public health research.
According to Huff, who worked at EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016, the organisation spent many years helping the Wuhan lab develop the ‘best existing methods to engineer bat coronaviruses to attack other species.’
