Yet another piece of the pandemic puzzle has fallen into place – after being hidden in plain sight until it was wiped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s (WIV) website.
Unearthed by The National Pulse‘s Natalie Winters, a Nov. 2017 report titled (no really): “Bats in China carry all the ingredients to make a new SARS virus,” describes how researchers at the WIV had identified ‘all the genes to make a SARS coronavirus similar to the epidemic strain,’ among 11 new strains of viruses collected in horseshoe bats.
“After five years of surveying bats in a cave in southern China’s Yunnan Province, Zhengli Shi and colleagues discovered 11 new strains of SARS-related viruses in horseshoe bats (especially in Rhinolophus sinicus). Within the strains, the researchers found all the genes to make a SARS coronavirus similar to the epidemic strain, says Shi, a virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
