COVID-19 origin: Ex-UK secret service chief claims it 'started as accident' in Chinese lab

Britan’s former secret service chief has sparked fresh speculations saying the coronavirus outbreak was a result of a Chinese lab accident. Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, told Planet Normal podcast that a new scientific report authored by a Norwegian-British research team suggests the pandemic “started as an accident” with the virus escaping from a Chinese laboratory.

The origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not known but preliminary studies suggested that the bats could be the source since the coronavirus present in bats has a genome that is 96 per cent identical to the novel coronavirus. It is believed that the wildlife market in Wuhan caused the virus to transmit through another host because the bat coronavirus cannot bind to receptors in human cells, however, there has not been any concrete evidence.

During the podcast, Dearlove raised the issue of whether China will pay reparations for the health crisis and economic wreckage it has brought upon the world. He said that every country in the world will now rethink how it treats its relationship with China and how the international community behaves towards the Chinese leadership. He also accused Beijing of covering the severity and scale of the virus outbreak.

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'Tip of the iceberg'

Earlier, a renowned Chinese virologist had claimed that the novel coronavirus is just “the tip of the iceberg” and called for an advanced study of the unknown viruses. Speaking to Chinese state television, Shi Zhengli, the deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, warned that if researchers don’t study the unknown viruses carried by wild animals in nature, there will possibly be another outbreak.

Shi, known for her work on coronavirus in bats, emphasised the need for the scientists and governments to remain transparent and cooperative for advance research into viruses. However, China’s “Bat Woman” said that the ongoing pandemic has nothing to do with the laboratory, claiming that the genetic characteristics of the viruses she worked with did not match with the novel coronavirus.

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