A Chinese virologist, Shi Zhengli, who is renowned for her work on viruses in bats, recently provided a new data that her laboratory wasn’t the source of the global pandemic. This research data was published in a scientific journal.
According to the South China Morning Post, the deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology said the latest blood tests on miners, who became sick with a mysterious respiratory disease eight years ago after clearing bat feces, showed they didn’t have the virus that caused Covid-19.
The serum samples of four people were used who caught the disease after working in a copper mine in Yunnan province.
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In a February paper, Shi said that bats could have been the initial hosts of Sars-CoV-2, the virus causing Covid-19, prompting theories that the pandemic was linked to a bat.
The paper cited Shi’s findings that were published in the Nature journal this week.
Shi, is renowned as China’s “bat woman”. It is said that the genetic characteristics of the viruses she had worked on didn’t match those of the coronavirus spreading in humans. The outbreak has infected more than 57.6 million people worldwide and killed over 1.37 million.