Shi Zhengli, a
Chinese virologist, also known as China’s “batwoman” because of her extensive work on
viruses in bats, presented new evidence confirming that her laboratory wasn’t
the source of coronavirus outbreak.

She published her research in the renowned
scientific journal Nature, expanding on her paper published in February.

Latest tests of
blood samples taken from minors who became sick after clearing bat faeces in copper
mines in Yunnan province in 2012 show that they were not infected with the
coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the deputy director of Wuhan Institute of
Virology said.

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The paper gives
details on how she and her team found the bat coronavirus known as RaTG13 in
2012.

Zheling heads the Centre for
Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In February,
she authored a paper suggesting that bats could have been the initial hosts of
coronavirus. This led to a lot speculation ranging from how the coronavirus was
engineered in her laboratory to leakage of a natural bat virus being studied by
her team.

She also revealed that the
genetic sequence of RaTG13 showed 96.2% similarity to the virus that causes
COVID-19. The difference of a mere 3.8% indicates that the bat coronavirus took
decades to mutate to become Sars-CoV-2.

However, the latest developments confirm that none of the
viruses collected from animals or humans by Shi and her team before the
COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan were Sars-CoV-2.

This contradicts the conspiracy theories
around Zheling’s team and the origin of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes
COVID-19.