Did coronavirus originate from this lab in China's Wuhan? | All you need to know
India TodaySpeculation has swirled since the start of the pandemic that Covid-19 may have emerged from a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Its scientists conduct research on the world's most dangerous diseases and helped shed light on the Covid-19 pathogen in the early days of the outbreak in Wuhan. Last February, they published work concluding that the new virus's genetic makeup was about 80 percent similar to the SARS coronavirus, and 96 percent identical at the whole-genome level to a coronavirus found in bats. Shi Zhengli, one of China's leading experts on bat coronaviruses and deputy director of the P4 lab, further raised eyebrows in a June 2020 interview with Scientific American magazine in which she said she was initially anxious over whether the virus had leaked from her lab. Other prominent global publications, including Le Monde and the Wall Street journal, as well as scientists at Harvard and Stanford, have published articles or reports saying the lab theory is one possibility.