Covid-19 was a ‘man-made’ virus, claims scientist who worked at the Wuhan lab

With merely any biosafety provisions, China's gain-of-function experiments — which are conducted to genetically alter organisms in order to enhance their biological functions — led to a leak at the Wuhan lab.

By: Express Web Desk

December 6, 2022 02:30 PM IST

3 min read

Huff worked with EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016 and became its vice president in 2015. (Photo: AndrewHuff.com)

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A US-based scientist, who worked at a research lab based in China’s Wuhan revealed Monday that Covid-19 was a “man-made virus” that had leaked from the facility, according to a report in The New York Post.

Andrew Huff, who had worked for a New York-based non-profit, EcoHealth Alliance, that engaged with the study of infectious diseases said that the coronavirus had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China more than two years ago. He further blamed authorities for the “biggest US intelligence failure since 9/11.”

In his new book, The Truth About Wuhan, Huff has claimed that the US government funded coronaviruses in China. With merely any biosafety provisions, China’s gain-of-function experiments — which are conducted to genetically alter organisms in order to enhance their biological functions — led to a leak at the Wuhan lab.

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According to the British newspaper, The Sun, epidemiologist Huff has revealed in his book, that the “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.”

A group at EcoHealth Alliance has been working with coronaviruses in bats for over a decade, while receiving funds from the National Institutes of Health, and has developed close ties with the Wuhan lab. Huff worked with the non-profit from 2014 to 2016 and became its vice president in 2015.

“China knew from day one that this was a genetically engineered agent,” Huff wrote. “I was terrified by what I saw,” Huff, who is an Army veteran from Michigan, told The Sun Online. “We were just handing them bioweapon technology.”

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The Wuhan lab has been at the center of global debates about the origins of the coronavirus over the past two years. The Chinese government and Wuhan lab authorities have repeatedly denied the allegations and called the theory of the virus originating in China’s lab facility “baseless.” However, top researchers have continued to look for answers to the virus’s origins.

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In June 2022, an expert group at the World Health Organization (WHO) sent two letters to senior Chinese government officials in February requesting them to share information about the earliest human cases of COVID-19 in the city of Wuhan. Highlighting the need for numerous studies to be conducted in this field of research, the experts at WHO asserted that they should be conducted “with the staff in the laboratories tasked with managing and implementing biosafety and biosecurity,” which would then lead to revelations about how viruses related to COVID-19 were managed.

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