Journalist:It is reported that Dr. Danielle Anderson, a former Assistant Professor at Duke-NUS Medical School who once worked in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, said that she's dumbfounded by the portrayal of the lab by some media outside China, and the toxic attacks on scientists that have ensued. Anderson is convinced no virus was made intentionally to infect people and deliberately released. Do you have any comment?
Wang Wenbin: China has repeatedly stressed that origin-tracing is a scientific matter that should not be politicized. Many scientists in the international community who uphold science, reason and objectivity, including Dr. Anderson, have expressed unequivocal opposition to politicizing the origin-tracing by some in the US.
Dr. Anderson also said that there were strict protocols and requirements at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and entering and exiting the facility was a carefully choreographed endeavor. Responding to the Wall Street Journal report which claimed three researchers from the lab were hospitalized with flu-like symptoms in November 2019, she said no one she knew at the Wuhan institute was ill toward the end of 2019.
Besides, we also saw reports that Massimo Galli, head of the Infectious Diseases Unit at the University of Milan-affiliated Luigi Sacco Hospital in Milan, Italy, said at a committee for social affairs of the Chamber of Deputies that the coronavirus is an unknown virus with no signs of genome engineering inside and the "lab-leak" theory has no scientific basis at all. Galli and three other Italian experts -- Massimo Ciccozzi from the University of Biomedical Campus in Rome, Fausto Baldanti, head of the virus research lab at the Fondazione IRCCS Policlinico San Matteo in Pavia, and Giuseppe Ippolito, an expert at the Lazzaro Spallanzani National Institute for Infectious Diseases -- believe that the virus is 99% likely to be the result of natural spillover.
Facts have proved time and again that the accusation of "Wuhan laboratory leaking the novel coronavirus" that some people in the US are clamoring for has no factual basis. We once again urge the US to respect facts and science, immediately stop politicizing origin-tracing, give a responsible explanation as soon as possible on the international community's concern about Fort Detrick and its over 200 bio labs around the world, and invite WHO experts to the US to carry out origin-tracing study at an early date.