MPs also heard that it is possible covid-19 was an engineered virus
A select committee of MPs has heard from one specialist that they consider a lab leak to be the likely source of covid-19.
This is because after two years of searching, an animal host for the virus has never been found.
Speaking to the
Science and Technology Select Committee, Dr Alina Chan, a specialist in gene therapy and cell engineering at MIT and Harvard, said there was also a risk that covid-19 was an engineered virus.
Dr Chan, said: "I think the lab origin is more likely than not. Right now it’s not safe for people who know about the origin of the pandemic to come forward. But we live in an era where there is so much information being stored that it will eventually come out.
"We have heard from many top virologists that a genetically engineered origin is reasonable and that includes virologists who made modifications to the first Sars virus.
"We know this virus has a unique feature, called the furin cleavage site, and without this feature there is no way this would be causing this pandemic.
"A proposal was leaked showing that EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were developing a pipeline for inserting novel furin cleavage sites. So, you find these scientists who said in early 2018 ‘I’m going to put horns on horses’ and at the end of 2019 a unicorn turns up in Wuhan city."
Chan wrote a book on her theory alongside Matt Ridley, who also told the committee that he believed a lab leak was now the likely origin.
Ridley told MPs: "I also think it’s more likely than not because we have to face the fact after two months we knew the origins of Sars, and after a couple of months we knew Mers was through camels, but after two years we still haven't found a single infected animal that could be the progenitor, and that’s incredibly surprising.
"We need to find out so we can prevent the next pandemic. We need to know whether we should be tightening up work in laboratories or whether we should be tightening up regulations related to wildlife markets. At the moment we are really not doing either.
"We also need to know to deter bad actors who are watching this episode and thinking that unleashing a pandemic is something they could get away with.
"We know now that experiments were being done at biosecurity level 2 (similar to a dentist's office) that resulted in 10,000 times increases in infectivity of viruses and three or four times their lethality. The important thing is to stop doing these experiments that are risky."
The exact origins of covid-19 are still unclear.
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