Chinese researchers isolated deadly bat coronaviruses near Wuhan animal market

1. Chinese officials have said the virus likely spread from wild animals to people at Wuhan's Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, not far from the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the national center for China's bat virus research.
2. Until the recent outbreak, all but two coronaviruses in China were studied at biosafety level-2 (BSL-2) facilities not the high-security BSL-4 laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology which provides only minimal protections against infection of lab workers, he said.
3. Virus collection, culture, isolation or animal infection at BSL-2 with a virus having the transmission characteristics of the outbreak virus would pose high risk of accidental infection of a lab worker, and from the lab worker, the public, he said.
4. Several Chinese state media outlets in recent months touted the virus research and lionized in particular a key researcher in Wuhan, Tian Junhua, as a leader in bat virus work.
5. The seven-minute film boasts that China has taken the lead in global virus research and uncovered over 2,000 viruses in the past 12 years, the time since the outbreak of the bat-origin virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
6. Bat coronaviruses are collected and studied by laboratories in multiple parts of China — including Wuhan Municipal CDC and Wuhan Institute of Virology, he told The Washington Times.
7. Biosecurity researcher Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University professor at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology, said the coronavirus behind the pandemic is 96.2% similar to a bat virus discovered by the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2013 and studied at the Wuhan CDC.
8. They write about collecting SARS-like coronaviruses from horseshoe bats and proving that, like the SARS virus itself, some of these other naturally occurring coronaviruses could infect human beings directly, Mr.
9. Chinese government researchers isolated more than 2,000 animal viruses, including deadly bat coronaviruses, and carried out scientific work on them just three miles from a wild animal market identified as the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.
10. Such practices would pose substantial risk of infection with a virus having transmission properties similar to those of the outbreak virus, he said.
11. The Chinese video Youth in the Wild Invisible Defender; records researchers engaged in casual handling of bats containing deadly viruses.
12. Tian shuttled through caves and jungles looking for viruses in bats and ticks, called ;vector organisms, in the quest to develop vaccines.

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