"Covid was a man-made virus that spilled from Chinese lab," says Wuhan Lab Scientist In New Book

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• Dec 5, 2022 | Dhupali Das

Huff claims in his book that China's gain-of-function tests were conducted with insufficient security, resulting in a leak at the...

Digital Desk: In what appears to be an unexpected revelation, a US-based scientist who worked at a controversial research lab in China's Wuhan has stated that COVID-19 was a "man-made virus" that spilled from the laboratory.

Covid was leaked two years ago from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a state-run and funded research centre, the New York Post reported, citing US-based researcher Andrew Huff's statement in the British newspaper The Sun.

Epidemiologist Huff says in his latest book, "The Truth About Wuhan," that the pandemic was caused by the US government's funding of coronaviruses in China. Excerpts of Huff's book have been out in the UK-based tabloid The Sun.

According to the New York Post, Huff is the former vice president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organization based in New York that studies infectious diseases.

Huff claims in his book that China's gain-of-function tests were conducted with insufficient security, resulting in a leak at the Wuhan lab, New York Post said. 

The Wuhan lab has been the focus of heated discussions regarding the COVID virus's origins, with both Chinese government authorities and lab staff denying that the virus originated there.

"Foreign laboratories did not have the adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, ultimately resulting in the lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology," Andrew Huff said in his book.

The organization has been studying several coronaviruses in bats for more than a decade, with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and has developed close links with the Wuhan lab.

The NIH is the main US government organization in charge of biomedical and public health research.

Huff, who worked at EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016, says that the non-profit aided the Wuhan lab for many years in establishing the "best existing ways to modify bat coronaviruses to infect other species."

"China knew from day one that this was a genetically engineered agent. The US government is to blame for the transfer of dangerous biotechnology to the Chinese," Huff wrote.

"What I saw horrified me. We were just handing them bioweapon technology," he told The Sun, according to The New York Post.

The Post also notes that, according to a recent ProPublica/Vanity Fair investigation, the WIV is home to China's most dangerous coronavirus research.

Despite limited resources, the ruling Chinese Communist Party has put enormous pressure on this research organization to make advances in science in order to improve its global status.