China is coming under increasing pressure over COVID-19 as scientists scrutinise the origins of the virus. Sky News Australia host Andrew Bolt of spoke to Professor Nikolai Petrovsky, Director of Endocrinology at Flinders Medical Centre, who said that the world’s scientific community had been “tricked by China.” China has strongly rejected any suggestion that the virus was man-made, or connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Andrew Bolt said on his show The Bolt Report: “Finally a lot of experts are now saying well actually it does now look like this virus maybe did escape from that Chinese lab and China is feeling the heat.”
Professor Petrovsky told him that although some Chinese scientists have suggested that COVID-19 originated from pangolins, this is unlikely to be the case.
“Everybody’s been trying to point the finger at the pangolins, but I think most virologists now accept that it’s unlikely that this virus came from a pangolin,” he said.
“There is a similarity between the spike proteins in the pangolin and in COVID-19, and in itself that could be considered highly suspicious.
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“Because the easiest way to get a pangolin spike protein and get it into a bat virus would be for someone in a lab to actually splice that gene out of the pangolin coronavirus and into the bat coronavirus.
“That’s exactly the type of research that we do know, and it’s public knowledge, was being undertaken by the Wuhan Institute of Virology in recent years.”
He went on to describe the work of his team in researching the virus.
He said that: “We were trying to study the virus and we found this unusual feature that was exquisitely adapted to infect humans from the very first episodes, and that didn’t fit with the normal picture of a pandemic virus.”
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A World Health Organisation (WHO) team investigating the origins of COVID-19 in China found no evidence that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab.
However, the team was closely monitored by Chinese authorities during its investigation, and one of its members told BBC news that China refused to hand over key data from the initial outbreak.
This week, the Biden administration pushed China for a further probe into a possible leak from the Wuhan lab.
China state media rejected the idea that Covid-19 had originated there as “a conspiracy created by US intelligence agencies.”
