https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/27/china-silent-coronavirus-origins-amid-wuhan-seafoo/
China’s government stood silent Monday in the face of growing scientific reports that the source of the deadly
Wuhan virus outbreak did not originate solely from a seafood market in the city.
President Xi Jinping faced mounting criticism on Chinese social media sites for failing to travel to the affected city in Hubei province. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang instead arrived in
Wuhan on Monday and is heading efforts to confront the epidemic.
Wuhan’s mayor and the
Communist Party secretary for the city of 11 million offered to resign amid criticism of their regional government’s mishandling of the deadly outbreak.
SEE ALSO: Hong Kong halts trains from mainland China as virus spreads
Suspicions about a link to a biological warfare leak in
Wuhan have been raised because the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory handles deadly viruses and its civilian and military research are intertwined in
China.
The Washington Times reported Friday that a former Israeli military intelligence analyst on the Chinese biological arms program said it is possible the disease escaped from one of two Chinese research facilities that are linked to
China’s covert biological weapons program.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology National Biosafety Laboratory is
China’s sole declared facility capable of conducting research on deadly viruses, including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
China declared a second laboratory, the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products, as part of biological warfare research under the Biological Weapons Convention.
The State Department said in a report last year that it suspects
China is working covertly on offensive biological weapons in violation of the convention.
A group of 29 Chinese researchers, writing in the British medical journal The Lancet, said the first person to become ill from the
Wuhan virus was identified on Dec. 1 and had no link to the animal market. The magazine Science reported the findings of the study on Sunday.
“No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases,” the report said. At least 13 victims of the virus had no apparent exposure to the seafood market. The market sold wild animals such as civet cats until it was closed on Jan. 1.
“That’s a big number, 13, with no link,” Daniel Lucey, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University, told Science.
Dr. Lucey, an infectious disease physician and adjunct professor of infectious diseases, told the online
