China hushed up findings of 'Bat Woman' scientist who unlocked coronavirus genetic makeup within days of outbreak
A Chinese scientist, one of the world's leading experts on coronaviruses, was reportedly "muzzled" by the state government after she unraveled the genetic composition of the novel coronavirus, which has claimed lives of over a million people across the world.
Shi Zhengli, also known as China's 'Bat Woman', had reportedly found the genetic composition of the virus, which is crucial in developing vaccines and diagnostic tests.
Reports state that Shi was called back to her high-security laboratory in Wuhan at the end of last year after a mysterious respiratory disease was identified as a novel coronavirus.
Shi, who has spent years on virus-hunting expeditions in dank caves leading to key scientific discoveries, reportedly completed the gene sequencing of the new coronavirus in just three days.
Shi and her team's work suggested that the virus was connected to horseshoe bats found over a 1,000 miles away in Yunnan, southern China. The virologist's findings showed that the virus was similar to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), an epidemic that spread in 33 countries after emerging from China in 2002.
A Chinese journalist, Gao Yu, said that he spoke to the scientist during his incarceration and revealed, "We learned later her institute finished gene-sequencing and related tests as early as January 2 but was muzzled," the Daily Mail reported.
The director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Yanyi Wang, on the same day had reportedly sent an email to staff and other officials ordering them not to disclose information about COVID-19. According to leak documents confirmed by the Hong Kong media, Yanyi warned that "inappropriate and inaccurate information" was causing "general panic".
Yanyi reportedly said that the National Health Commission "unequivocally requires that any tests, clinical data, test results, conclusions related to the epidemic shall not be posted on social media platforms, nor shall [it] be disclosed to any media outlets including government official media, nor shall [it] be disclosed to partner institutions."
However, after eight days, a team, lead by a professor in Shanghai who received samples from a coronavirus infected patient, published a genome sequence of the particular on an open access platform. Two days after the publication, the professor's lab was closed for "rectification."
The general public, at the time, was told that no new cases of the virus had been reported in the region for over a week, and there was no evidence of human transmission despite dozens of health workers who were beginning to fall ill.
Shi, in March, said that her team had found on January 14 that the virus could infect people, nearly six days before China revealed this information. The World Health Organization, on the same day, also wrote a tweet supporting China's denials of human transmissions at the time.
The virologist team released its data identifying the disease on a scientific portal on January 23 before it was published by the journal Nature the next month. The data stated that the genomic sequence was 96 percent identical to another virus they found in horseshoe bats in Yunnan.
Shi, who has earned global recognition for her work probing links between bats and coronaviruses, was an important part of the team that traced SARS to horseshoe bats through civets, who are often eaten in China.