Washington:The head of China's Wuhan virology lab, also called as the 'bat woman', and an expert from the University of North Carolina in the US, had in a paper published in 2015 flagged the dangers of their gain-of-function experiment of a novel coronavirus which could infect human cells, media reports said.
"Scientific review panels may deem similar studies too risky to pursue," the researchers wrote in the paper and warned the world of "a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations".
The findings were published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine. It was unearthed by a small team of investigators, commissioned by Matthew Pottinger, the deputy National Security Adviser in the Donald Trump administration. The team aimed to unravel the origins of Covid-19.
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The Vanity Fair report quoted Pottinger as saying there were so many people within the government "wholly discounting the possibility of a lab leak, who were predisposed that it was impossible".
In addition, many leading experts had either received or approved funding for gain-of-function research. Their "conflicted" status, said Pottinger, "played a profound role in muddying the waters and contaminating the shot at having an impartial inquiry".
The 2015 paper's acknowledgements also cited funding from the US National Institutes of Health and from a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, which had parcelled out grant money from the US Agency for International Development, the report said.