State media report warned
Video footage aired by Chinese state media has revealed Chinese scientists at the Wuhan Institute of virology studying ‘a novel coronavirus’ that they discovered within bats in 2018, less than two years before the outbreak.
The video was broadcast by communist mouthpiece CCTV in April 2018, but has since reemerged on the web following the global coronavirus spread.
The so called ‘bat woman’ Shi Zhengli, a lead researcher from the institute, has claimed that the pathogen scientists were working on in the video is different from the current strain of coronavirus that has now killed hundreds of thousands around the world.
The video highlights that the virus was found in rufous horseshoe bats, native to East and South Asia, but not found naturally in Wuhan.
Separate research has found that the coronavirus we have come to know is 96% identical to the strain in these bats.
The strain was found to be responsible for a large outbreak of fatal disease in pigs in southern China just one year earlier.
