The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has been accused of leaking the novel coronavirus, has seen its key figure, Shi Zhengli, move to Guangzhou for work.
According to a report from Chinese media Pengpai News on November 3, Shi Zhengli, a long-time researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has started work at a laboratory in Guangzhou.
On October 31, Wuhan University’s official website published a post titled “Yan Huan Team’s First Nature Article on Artificially Designed Virus Receptor,” which mentioned a paper titled “Design of Customized Coronavirus Receptors” published in the international scientific journal Nature on October 30. The first paragraph identified Shi Zhengli as one of the researchers in the team. Shi Zhengli, as a co-corresponding author of the paper, is affiliated with the laboratory in Guangzhou and the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Information from the Guangzhou laboratory’s official website indicates that Shi Zhengli has been working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences since July 1990, holding roles as a research intern, assistant researcher, associate researcher, and promoted to researcher in October 2000. In May 2024, she transferred to Guangzhou as a researcher at the laboratory there.
The Guangzhou laboratory was officially established in May 2021, with research and clinical areas located in Guangzhou International Biotech Island and Datan Island, overseen by academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Zhong Nanshan.
Previously, Shi Zhengli conducted research on bat coronaviruses, cross-species infections, and virus function enhancement at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan at the beginning of 2020, the Wuhan Institute of Virology has faced widespread accusations of a virus leak leading to the global spread of the coronavirus.
As the world continues to battle the effects of the pandemic after three years, the looming threat of the virus persists, with new dangers seemingly on the horizon.
In China, the COVID-19 situation has been escalating this year, with frequent drills for “unidentified pneumonia prevention and control” stirring up fear among the public, reminiscent of the initial outbreak. Some experts speculate that these drills are in fact targeting COVID-19, just under a different label, raising concerns that authorities may be aware of a new virus.
In July of last year, the then-director of the Emerging Infectious Diseases Research Center at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shi Zhengli, abruptly warned in a paper that an epidemic caused by a coronavirus was “highly likely” to recur. Former Deputy Director of the Taiwan Department of Health, Li Longteng, told the Epoch Times at the time that Shi Zhengli herself knew, and of course could predict that it would happen again. “They made the (novel coronavirus), and as long as they don’t release it, there won’t be an outbreak.”
US-based political and economic analyst Qin Peng believes that the global COVID-19 pandemic has long been suspected to be a result of transmission from Chinese Communist Party labs and negligence on the part of the CCP, with Shi Zhengli merely issuing a tepid warning, not offering a solution to the problem.
In 2015, Shi Zhengli and her collaborators published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine describing how a bat coronavirus genetically modified to be similar to SARS-CoV could infect humans and had increased transmissibility.
Following the outbreak of COVID-19 on the eve of the New Year in 2020, international media extensively covered Shi Zhengli’s anxiety and fear, revealing that she had several nights without sleep, continuously questioning if the virus leaked from her lab experiments.
The “unidentified pneumonia” in Wuhan resulted in a large number of deaths, but due to obstruction by the Chinese Communist Party, efforts to trace the origin of the virus have faced challenges. The theories regarding the virus’s origin generally fall into two categories: natural occurrence and lab leak. The Wuhan Institute of Virology continues to be viewed by some international media and observers as a focal point for origin tracing investigations.
On September 17 last year, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged the Chinese authorities to provide complete access so that a second group of experts could resume the virus origin tracing investigation in China and once again called for more information about the origin of the novel coronavirus. However, the matter was left unresolved.