According to a report, a scientist who worked at a contentious research lab in China claimed that COVID was a man-made virus that leaked from the facility.
Andrew Huff, a virus researcher who worked for a non-profit in New York, said COVID was leaked from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology two years ago and blamed authorities for the “biggest US intelligence failure since 9/11,” according to The Sun.
The lab has been the site of heated debates over the origins of COVID, with both Chinese government officials and lab personnel denying that the virus originated there.
In his new book, “The Truth About Wuhan,” epidemiologist Huff claims that the pandemic was caused by the US government’s funding of coronaviruses in China.
He claimed that China’s gain-of-function experiments were conducted with lax security, resulting in a leak at the Wuhan lab.
“Foreign laboratories did not have adequate control measures in place to ensure proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, resulting in the lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” he wrote in his book, which was excerpted exclusively in the newspaper.
Over the last two years, there has been mounting evidence that the virus was leaked from the lab.
Some experts believe the virus may have escaped through an infected scientist or improper waste disposal at the facility. According to a report in the Daily Mail earlier this year, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, told a European politician that he feared the virus would escape from the lab in “a catastrophic accident” in 2019.
Huff is a former vice president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organization based in New York that studies infectious diseases. For more than a decade, the group has been studying different coronaviruses in bats with funding from the National Institutes of Health, and it has developed close ties with the Wuhan lab.
Huff, who worked at EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016, stated that the non-profit assisted the Wuhan lab for many years in developing the “best existing methods to engineer bat coronaviruses to attack other species.”
“China knew this was a genetically engineered agent from the start,” Huff wrote. “The transfer of dangerous biotechnology to the Chinese is the fault of the US government.”
“What I saw terrified me,” the army veteran from Michigan told The Sun. “All we were doing was handing them bioweapon technology.”
According to a recent investigation published by ProPublica/Vanity Fair, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a state-run and funded research facility home to China’s riskiest coronavirus research, has been under immense pressure by the ruling Chinese Communist Party to produce scientific breakthroughs to raise China’s global status despite a lack of resources.
Sources: The Sun, NY Post
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