Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
A health institution United States of America called funding virus research corona at the Institute of Virology Wuhan, China.
The laboratory continues to be debated because it is said to be the place where the corona virus began to spread due to research that was leaked at the end of 2019.
In a 900-page document obtained The InterceptThe health agency EcoHealth Alliance is said to have used US federal government money to conduct a research project on the coronavirus that infects bats in the laboratory.
“(The proposal) is a roadmap to high-risk research that could lead to the current pandemic,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Right To Know, one of the organizations investigating the origins of Covid-19.
Research proposal entitled ‘Understanding the Risks of Bat Corona Virus Emergence’ it outlines the ambitious intention of the EcoHealth Alliance to research thousands of bat samples to create a new coronavirus.
The document also lays out some important details about coronavirus research in Wuhan, including one of the coronavirus experiments on a mouse that was modified so that the cells resembled humans.
The experiment was carried out in a level 3 biosafety laboratory at the Wuhan University Animal Experiment Center, not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as previously reported.
The EcoHealth Alliance used a total of US$43.1 million in US federal grants, including US$599,000 for research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The hundreds of thousands of dollars were used to research identifying and changing whether the coronavirus that infects bats is likely to infect humans.
Long before the Covid-19 pandemic, many scientists were concerned about the potential dangers associated with such research.
The EcoHealth Alliance also recognizes and describes these risks in its coronavirus research proposal.
“Field work involving the highest risk of exposure to SARS or other CoV, while working in caves with lots of bats on their heads potentially contaminated with fecal dust from these animals,” the EcoHealth Alliance research proposal reads.
According to molecular biologist at Rutgers University, Richard Ebright, the document contains important information about research carried out in the Wuhan laboratory, including the creation of new viruses.
“The virus they created was tested for their ability to infect mice that were engineered to display human-type receptors on their cells,” said Ebright.
Ebright also said the document made clear that two strains of the new coronavirus could infect human mice.
“While scientists were studying SARS-related coronaviruses, they were also doing parallel projects on MERS-related coronaviruses at the same time,” Ebright said.
A molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, Alina Chan, said the document showed that the EcoHealth Alliance had reasons to take the laboratory leak theory seriously as the origin of the spread of Covid-19 in the world.
“In the proposal, they actually showed that they knew how risky this research was. They kept talking about people who could potentially be bitten, and they kept records of everyone who was bitten,” Chan said.
“Does the EcoHealth Alliance have that record? Otherwise, how could they rule out the risk of a research-related accident?” he added.
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