Don't rule out lab leak: Former China's CDC chief on COVID-19 origin

A former top Chinese government scientist has said that the possibility the Covid virus leaked from a laboratory should not be ruled out. Prof George Gao played a major role in the pandemic response and efforts to trace its origins as head of China's Centre for Disease Control (CDC).

China's government dismisses any suggestion the disease may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory. But Prof Gao is less forthright.

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In an interview with BBC Radio 4 podcast, Prof Gao said, "You can always suspect anything. That's science. Don't rule out anything." Prof Gao, the world-leading virologist and immunologist, is now vice-president of the National Natural Science Foundation of China after retiring from the CDC in 2022.

Prof. Gao also informed the news organisation that some sort of formal inquiry into the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was conducted, which may be a clue that the Chinese government may have taken the lab leak idea more seriously than its public comments imply.

"The government organised something," he says, but adds that it did not involve his own department, the China CDC.

When asked to clarify whether that meant another branch of government carried out a formal search of the WIV - one of China's top national laboratories, known to have spent years studying coronaviruses, the professor said, "Yeah, that lab was double-checked by the experts in the field."

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It's the first such acknowledgement that some kind of official investigation took place, but while Prof Gao said he has not seen the result, he has "heard" that the lab was given a clean bill of health. "I think their conclusion is that they are following all the protocols. They haven't found (any) wrongdoing."

However, other scientists have said that there is not enough evidence to rule out the main alternative possibility - that the virus infected someone involved in research which was designed to better understand the threat of viruses emerging from nature.

• COVID-19
• COVID-19 origin
• China
• Chinese government
• WIV
• Wuhan Institute of Virology
• Centre for Disease Control
• CDC