Wuhan Institute of Virology is a research institute located in the Jiangxia District of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province.

In 2015, this institute in Wuhan opened the first P4 laboratory in China, at a cost of 300 million yuan ($ 44 million). Its design, started in 2003, was done in collaboration with France. Part of the staff trained in particular at the P4 Jean Mérieux laboratory in Lyon.
In February 2017, the French Prime Minister participated in the laboratory's accreditation ceremony. The French Embassy in China reminds us that this project must allow China, in a pioneering partnership with France, to better understand and prevent epidemics and pandemics including the most dangerous ones, such as avian flu, in order to protect the Chinese population and global health. Wuhan is accredited to study Ebola, Coronavirus and Henipavirus.

Speculation and investigation around the Covid-19

On Friday November 20, 2015, that is, four years before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, an article appeared in the journal Nature involving an international team of virologists, including Shi Zhengli, a specialist in Coronaviruses who actively fought against the epidemic of the SARS in 2002-2004.

Using the SARS-CoV2² reverse genetics system, the team announces that it has generated a chimeric virus ( artificially designed hybrid virus ) using a SHC014 bat coronavirus and a SARS-CoV. This chimeric virus would have been tested on a mouse. The results indicate that this type of virus can replicate effectively in cells of the primary human respiratory tract. In vivo experiments demonstrate the replication of this virus in the lungs of mice with notable pathogenesis. This team operated in a laboratory at the University of North Carolina in the United States.

Nevertheless, it is on the basis of this article that conspiracy theories appear from January 26, 2020, according to which the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 emanates from the laboratory, or even was designed to harm it.

A study by researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi found, on January 31, 2020, on the bioRxiv site "a strange similarity", "which is unlikely to be fortuitous", between the DNA of SARS Covid -2 and that of AIDS.

However, at a press conference the hypothesis is rejected by the World Health Organization², who stresses that all the evidence goes to an "animal origin" and not to any one handling.

Allegations of negligence

Several months earlier, the American daily newspaper Washington Post reported that "the US Embassy in Beijing, after several visits to the institute, had alerted the American authorities in 2018 about apparently insufficient security measures in a laboratory which studied coronavirus from bats'.

As of April 20, 2020 in the press, photos taken in the institute having circulated previously resurface. It shows scientists doing research in the Wuhan laboratory with damaged equipment. The photos taken inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology allegedly showed a deteriorated seal in the door of a freezer containing 1,500 strains of deadly virus ( including that linked to the Covid-19 pandemic ), according to the Sun.

On April 21, 2020, it was established that it was the Chinese state media that inadvertently published these images ( as early as February ) to pretend to show scientists the total security of the Institute.

Two reports (Fox News and Washington Post) cite anonymous sources expressing concern about a leak from the Wuhan Institute's Covid-19. But it would be accidental. These photos, believed to have sounded the alarm for the coronavirus, were hastily deleted by China.

For Professor Luc Montagnier, SARS-CoV-2 is an artificial chimeric virus (containing HIV DNA); but that does not exclude in any case the theory of an accidental flight from the Wuhan Institute.

Indeed, Richard H. Ebright, director of the laboratory of the Waksman Institute of microbiology, affirms that "documented evidence indicates that a project on the new bat viruses [...] of the Institute of virology employed standards of biosafety and personal protective equipment, which would pose a high risk of infection for laboratory personnel in contact with a virus having the transmission properties of the epidemic virus. "

Investigations and procedures

Suspicions about China's initial responsibility for the Covid-19 epidemic are not limited to the United States alone. Missouri is actually filing a complaint against China. On April 19, 2020, Australia also requested an investigation into China's treatment of the epidemic, as well as an investigation into the origins and spread of the virus; then New Zealand, the following days, as well as the European Union.