An Australian virologist who worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the lead-up to the pandemic said odds that COVID-19 leaked from the lab are slim, but she is not “naive” enough to discount the theory yet.
Danielle Anderson, 42, said the lab had extensive safeguards in place to prevent leakage, telling Bloomberg that the hard evidence to support the idea that the virus leaked from the lab is lacking, but added, “I’m not naive enough to say I absolutely write this off.”
Anderson was the only foreign virologist working in the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s highest-level biocontainment lab in which scientists research highly transmissible pathogens such as the one that causes COVID-19. She worked at the WIV lab up until November 2019, when three researchers were hospitalized “with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.”
THIS IS THE EVIDENCE RESEARCHERS SAY COULD SETTLE THE COVID-19 LAB LEAK DEBATE
But Anderson said nobody she knew from the lab was sick around that time, adding that there are special protocols to follow when reporting symptoms of a pathogen being studied in high-risk biocontainment labs.
“If people were sick, I assume that I would have been sick — and I wasn’t,” she said. “I was tested for coronavirus in Singapore before I was vaccinated, and had never had it.”
The theory that posits the pathogen leaked out of the high-security lab where coronaviruses in bats are studied has garnered renewed interest over the past couple of months.
Anderson, meanwhile, believes the virus most likely came from a source in nature, such as an animal, and was transmitted to humans. This process is known as zoonotic spillover. Researchers have not yet found the animal that acted as an intermediary between the animal reservoir for the virus, believed to be bats, and humans. Still, Anderson said she could “foresee how things could maybe happen,” if she were given hard evidence to support the lab leak theory.
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The Biden administration and foreign allies at the G-7 summit earlier this month signaled their support for an investigation by the World Health Organization into the lab leak theory. Biden had already ordered the U.S. intelligence community late last month to look into the possibility of a leak and report back to him in 90 days.
