Dr Shi Zhengli, a Chinese scientist who is under scanner following reports that the coronavirus pandemic might have originated with a leak from her specialised lab in the city of Wuhan, has denied that her institution is to be blamed for the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.

This is what China’s batwoman said about Wuhan leak: 

“How on earth can I offer up evidence for something where there is no evidence?” Dr Zhengli told the New York Times.

“I don’t know how the world has come to this, constantly pouring filth on an innocent scientist,” she added. 

The lab leak hypothesis floated last year during the global outbreak, but was widely dismissed as a conspiracy theory. However, it has again gained momentum following reports that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell sick in 2019 after visiting a bat cave in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan.

Some scientists have claimed that Dr Shi, who is an expert in bat coronaviruses, could have been leading so-called “gain-of-function” experiments in which scientists increase the strength of a virus to better study its effects on hosts.

According to the New York Times, in 2017, Dr Shi and her colleagues at the Wuhan laboratory published a report on an experiment “in which they created new hybrid bat coronaviruses by mixing and matching parts of several existing ones – including at least one that was nearly transmissible to humans – in order to study their ability to infect and replicate in human cells.”

Shi, however, said her experiments differed from gain-of-function experiments since they did not seek to make a virus more dangerous. Instead, they were trying to understand how the virus might jump across species.

“My lab has never conducted or cooperated in conducting GOF experiments that enhance the virulence of viruses,” she said in an email to the outlet.