The Chinese lab that the FBI believes likely leaked COVID-19 may have also released a “highly evolved” strain of polio in 2014, according to a new study from France’s prestigious Pasteur Institute. The Mail has more.
A bombshell new study suggests that this polio strain, which infected a four-year-old boy amid a wider viral outbreak in China’s Anhui province, is “99%” identical to a polio variant that was stored 200 miles away, during that same time period, at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Researchers at France’s Pasteur Institute cannot say with certainty where this strain, dubbed ‘WIV14,’ originated. But they insisted two possibilities “must be explored” — including the chance that WIV14 polio originated within the Wuhan institute itself.
“The findings underscore the shocking unsafe state of global virology research,” Harvard-trained molecular biologist Dr. Richard Ebright, who was not involved with the research, told DailyMail.com.
The Pasteur researchers suspect that WIV14 polio, so named by the Wuhan scientists who first catalogued the strain, likely evolved from a well-preserved 1950s strain of the virus used — almost exclusively — in vaccine production and laboratory settings.
The Wuhan lab’s rough proximity to Anhui province and its burgeoning reputation for lax safety protocols have also added weight to this possible explanation.
If true, the theory would join a chorus of outcry over safety lapses at China’s state-run infectious disease lab, whose U.S. funding was cut last year by the Biden White House amid ongoing scrutiny on Capitol Hill over its role in the COVID-19 pandemic.
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