China mulls bill to tackle workplace discrimination against women

Yahoo – AFP, December 25, 2021

Assembly-line workers at a factory in Fuyang in eastern China (AFP/STR)

Chinese lawmakers are discussing new rules to prevent workplace discrimination and sexual harassment against women amid a string of high-profile cases in recent months. 

A draft bill published Friday includes a ban on employers stating gender preferences on job ads and quizzing female applicants about their marital or pregnancy status –- a common practice that has been criticised for decades. 

Rapid economic growth in the past four decades coupled with the one-child rule has opened up more educational and employment opportunities for Chinese women. 

But women's participation in the workforce has dropped, due to gender-based filtering when hiring and as more women care for families amid a severe shortage of affordable childcare options. 

A report by Human Rights Watch in June found that one in five civil service job postings in 2019 specified a preference for male applicants. 

The report also says that it was a common practice for employers including schools to force female staff to sign contracts promising not to get pregnant for several years as a pre-condition for being hired. 

The proposed new rules come amid concerns that China's new three-child rule could make employers even more reluctant to hire women and as officials crack down on the local #MeToo movement after a string of cases that led to a public outcry over sexual assault in the workplace. 

Earlier this month, e-commerce giant Alibaba group fired a female staffer who had accused a manager of sexual assault. 

The proposed amendments will make enforcement easier by clearly defining what sexual harassment is, state-run Xinhua news agency said. 

According to a draft text published Friday, it prohibits "vulgar speech", "inappropriate physical behaviour" or "the display or dissemination of sexual images, information, text, audio or video". 

It also requires employers to set up mechanisms to prevent, investigate and respond to such complaints "without delay", but there were no details on any penalties for failing to do so. 

The amendments are open for public comment until January 22, 2022.

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US, UN demand proof of missing Chinese tennis star's well-being

US, UN demand proof of missing Chinese tennis star's well-being

Yahoo – AFP, Robin MILLARD, November 19, 2021 

The WTA is threatening to pull out of China if tennis star Peng Shui's
whereabouts and safety are not confirmed (AFP/GREG BAKER) 

The United States and UN on Friday demanded proof of Peng Shuai's whereabouts and well-being amid rising concern for the tennis star, missing since alleging she was sexually exploited by a former vice-premier of China. 

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said President Joe Biden's administration wanted China to "provide independent, verifiable proof" of Peng's whereabouts and expressed "deep concern" about the former world top-ranked doubles player. 

The United Nations insisted on a fully transparent investigation into the claims made by Peng against Communist Party grandee Zhang Gaoli. 

Tennis stars, sports bodies, governments and human rights defenders also spoke up for Peng, 35, and demanded information. 

The head of the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) said he was prepared to cut lucrative business ties with China if Peng remains unaccounted for and her sexual assault allegations are not probed. 

Serena Williams, Novak Djokovic and Naomi Osaka have also voiced their concerns for one of China's greatest ever players. 

"It would be important to have proof of her whereabouts and well-being," Liz Throssell, a spokeswoman for the UN Human Rights Office, told reporters in Geneva. 

"According to available information, Peng, a former world doubles number one, hasn't been heard from publicly since she alleged on social media that she had been sexually assaulted. 

"We are calling for an investigation with full transparency into her allegation of sexual assault." 

WTA threatens China pull-out 

Peng alleged on the Chinese social media site Weibo earlier this month that Zhang, now in his 70s, had "forced" her into sex during a long-term on-off relationship. 

The claims were quickly scrubbed from the Twitter-like platform and she has not been seen since. 

The WTA, the top world body for women's tennis, has called for proof that Peng is safe. 

Its boss Steve Simon said he is willing to lose hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Chinese business in one of the WTA's biggest markets to ensure Peng's safety. 

"We're definitely willing to pull our business and deal with all the complications that come with it," Simon told CNN. 

"Women need to be respected and not censored," he added. 

Tennis legend Serena Williams also demanded an investigation. 

"I am devastated and shocked to hear about the news of my peer, Peng Shuai," the former singles world number one wrote on Twitter. 

"This must be investigated and we must not stay silent." 

Peng represented China in the Beijing, London and Rio de Janeiro Olympics and won gold for China at the 2010 Asian Games. 

She is a former Wimbledon and French Open doubles champion. 

France said the international community and sports bodies were worried for Peng's situation. 

"We are concerned about the lack of information," the French foreign ministry said. 

"We call on the Chinese authorities to implement their commitments in the fight against violence against women." 

The Lawn Tennis Association, the sport's governing body in Britain, offered its assistance to the WTA in its efforts to establish Peng's safety. 

Email doubts 

Peng's claims brought the #MeToo movement into the highest echelons of China's ruling Communist Party for the first time. 

"The Chinese government has systematically silenced the country's #MeToo movement," said Amnesty International's China researcher Doriane Lau. 

"Given that it also has a zero-tolerance approach to criticism, it is deeply concerning that Peng Shuai appears to be missing," she said. 

China has repeatedly refused to comment on her fate or the case. 

But Hu Xijin, the outspoken editor of the Communist Party-owned Global Times, tweeted on Friday that he didn't believe that "Peng Shuai has received retaliation and repression speculated by foreign media for the thing people talked about". 

Earlier this week, state-run CGTN published a screenshot on Twitter of what it said was an email written by Peng to Simon and other WTA officials. 

In the email, Peng claims that her earlier accusations are "not true" and says she is "resting at home and everything is fine". 

But doubts were quickly flagged about the awkward language used in the purported email and the cursor visible in the screenshot. 

Simon said that he was struggling to believe the email was authentic. 

"I don't think there's any validity in it and we won't be comfortable until we have a chance to speak with her," he said. 

Amnesty's Lau said: "China's state media has a track record of forcing statements out of individuals under duress, or else simply fabricating them."

Chinese citizen journalist jailed for Wuhan virus reporting

Yahoo – AFP, 28 December 2020 

Authoroties said former Chinese lawyer and citizen journalist
Zhang Zhan had spread "False remarks" online.

A Chinese citizen journalist was jailed for four years Monday for her reporting from Wuhan as the Covid-19 outbreak began, her lawyer said, almost a year after details of an "unknown viral pneumonia" surfaced in the central China city. 

Zhang Zhan, a former lawyer who arrived at court in a wheelchair, was sentenced at a brief hearing in a Shanghai court for allegedly "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" during her reporting in the chaotic initial stages of the outbreak. 

Her live reports and essays were shared on social media platforms in February, grabbing the attention of authorities, who have punished eight virus whistleblowers so far as they curb criticism of the government's response to the outbreak. 

Beijing has congratulated itself for "extraordinary" success in controlling the virus inside its borders, with an economy on the rebound while much of the rest of the world stutters through painful lockdowns and surging caseloads a year on from the start of the pandemic in Wuhan. 

Controlling the information flow during an unprecedented global health crisis has been pivotal in allowing China's communist authorities to reframe the narrative in their favour, with President Xi Jinping being garlanded for his leadership by the country's ruling party. 

But that has come at a serious cost to anyone who has picked holes in the official storyline. 

The court said Zhang Zhan had spread "false remarks" online, according to one of her lawyers Zhang Keke, but the prosecution did not fully divulge its evidence in court. 

"We had no way of understanding what exactly Zhang Zhan was accused of doing," he added, describing it as "a speedy, rushed hearing." 

In return the defendant "didn't respond [to questions]... She refused to answer when the judge asked her to confirm her identity." 

The defendant's mother sobbed loudly as the verdict was read out, Ren Quanniu, another member of Zhang's defence team, told reporters who were barred from entering the court. 

Concerns are mounting over the health of 37-year-old Zhang, who began a hunger strike in June and has been force-fed via a nasal tube. 

Her legal team said her health was in decline and she suffered from headaches, dizziness and stomach pain, and that she had appeared in court in a wheelchair. 

"She said when I visited her (last week): 'If they give me a heavy sentence then I will refuse food until the very end.'... She thinks she will die in prison," Ren said before the trial. 

"It's an extreme method of protesting against this society and this environment." 

China's communist authorities have a history of putting dissidents on trial in opaque courts between Christmas and New Year in an effort to minimise Western scrutiny. 

Example made

The sentencing comes just weeks before an international team of World Health Organization experts is expected to arrive in China to investigate the origins of Covid-19. 

Zhang was critical of the early response in Wuhan, writing in a February essay that the government "didn't give people enough information, then simply locked down the city". 

"This is a great violation of human rights," she wrote. 

Rights groups and embassies have also drawn attention to her case, although diplomats from several countries were denied requests to monitor the hearing. 

"Zhang Zhan's case raises serious concerns about media freedom in China," the British embassy in Beijing said, urging "China to release all those detained for their reporting." 

Authorities "want to use her case as an example to scare off other dissidents from raising questions about the pandemic situation in Wuhan earlier this year", added Leo Lan, research and advocacy consultant at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders NGO. 

A United Nations official following the trial also expressed "deep concern" about the verdict. 

"We raised her case with the authorities throughout 2020 as an example of the excessive clampdown on freedom of expression linked to #COVID19 & continue to call for her release," the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said in a tweet. 

Zhang is the first of a group of four citizen journalists detained by authorities after reporting from Wuhan to face trial. 

Previous attempts by AFP to contact the other three -- Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin and Li Zehua -- were unsuccessful. 

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Wuhan lab had three live bat coronaviruses: Chinese state media

Yahoo – AFP, May 24, 2020

The director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology told a Chinese state broadcaster
that the lab has three live strains of bat coronavirus on-site, but that claims the
coronavirus could have leaked from the facility were 'pure fabrication' (AFP Photo/
Hector RETAMAL)

The Chinese virology institute at the centre of US allegations it may have been the source of the COVID-19 pandemic has three live strains of bat coronavirus on-site, but none match the new global contagion, its director has said.

Scientists think COVID-19 -- which first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan and has killed more than 340,000 people worldwide -- originated in bats and could have been transmitted to people via another mammal.

But the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology told state broadcaster CGTN that claims made by US President Donald Trump and others the virus could have leaked from the facility were "pure fabrication".

In the interview filmed on May 13 but broadcast Saturday night, Wang Yanyi said the centre has "isolated and obtained some coronaviruses from bats".

"Now we have three strains of live viruses... But their highest similarity to SARS-CoV-2 only reaches 79.8 percent," she said, referring to the coronavirus strain that causes COVID-19.

One of their research teams, led by Professor Shi Zhengli, has been researching bat coronaviruses since 2004 and focused on the "source tracing of SARS", the strain behind another virus outbreak nearly two decades ago.

"We know that the whole genome of SARS-CoV-2 is only 80 percent similar to that of SARS. It's an obvious difference," she said.

"So, in Professor Shi's past research, they didn't pay attention to such viruses which are less similar to the SARS virus."

Plans for more labs

Conspiracy rumours that the biosafety lab was involved in the outbreak swirled online for months before Trump and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brought the theory into the mainstream by claiming that there is evidence the pathogen came from the institute.

The United States and Australia have called in recent weeks for an investigation into the origins of the pandemic.

Chinese scientists have said that the virus first emerged at a market selling live animals in Wuhan, though officials in Beijing more recently cast doubt about its origins.

Chinese Foreign minister Wang Yi on Sunday blasted what he called efforts by US politicians to "fabricate rumours" about the pathogen's origins and "stigmatise China".

He said China would be "open" to international cooperation to identify the source of the novel coronavirus, as long as any investigation is "free of political interference".

The World Health Organization has said Washington offered no evidence to support the "speculative" claims about the Wuhan lab.

The Wuhan lab has said it received samples of the then-unknown virus on December 30, determined the viral genome sequence on January 2 and submitted information on the pathogen to the WHO on January 11.

Wang Yanyi said in the interview that before it received samples in December, their team had never "encountered, researched or kept the virus".

"In fact, like everyone else, we didn't even know the virus existed," she said. "How could it have leaked from our lab when we never had it?"

At a press conference Sunday, Zhao Chenxin, deputy secretary-general of the National Development and Reform Commission, said every Chinese prefecture must have its own P3 laboratory to ramp up preparations against infectious diseases.

Apart from the P3 lab plans -- the second-highest biosafety classification for labs handling pathogens -- Zhao said each city should also have a lower-level P2 laboratory so they could "quickly respond in a major epidemic".

The Wuhan institute has both P3 and P4 labs.

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US, China block UN resolution in spat over WHO handling of pandemic

Yahoo –AFP, April 30, 2020

The UN General Assembly in New York (AFP Photo/TIMOTHY A. CLARY)

The United States and China remained at loggerheads Thursday over a UN Security Council draft resolution calling for a 90-day humanitarian pause in conflicts worldwide in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

The stalemate -- over a mention of the World Health Organization -- leaves little hope of a quick vote as the Security Council struggles to find a response to the global crisis, remaining largely mute since the once-in-a-century pandemic began killing tens of thousands of people and shutting down economies across the world.

"It's a major stalemate, nobody's moving," one diplomat told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"We're treading water," said another.

At a news conference, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres deplored the impasse.

"It's absolutely essential that countries come together and that the big powers are able to overcome their difficulties in order to allow for the Security Council to be more active and more effective," he said.

"We need unity and strength from the international community. All our efforts depend on strong political backing."

The text, authored by France and Tunisia and obtained by AFP, has been under discussion for weeks.

It calls for a 90-day humanitarian pause to bring aid to the most vulnerable populations caught in conflicts around the globe, including in places such as Afghanistan and Yemen.

The draft also supports a March 23 plea by Guterres for a worldwide ceasefire to facilitate the fight against the coronavirus.

But Washington and Beijing remain at loggerheads over how to refer to the World Health Organization (WHO) in the text.

The UN General Assembly in New York (AFP Photo/TIMOTHY A. CLARY)

The WHO's role in dealing with the pandemic has been vilified by US President Donald Trump, who complained it had not been transparent about the coronavirus and suspended US funding to it. China responded by offering additional funding.

China "insists on a mention of the World Health Organization" in the text, while the United States does not want it, several diplomats explained, asking for anonymity.

"We don't comment on ongoing negotiations" at the Security Council, the US State Department said when asked about the stalemate.

No reaction could be obtained from the Chinese mission to the UN.

The co-authors of the text, like the rest of the Security Council, are reduced to waiting for a compromise between the two permanent members, each of which has a right of veto.

There has been no progress since the beginning of the week, other diplomats added.

Blank paragraph

A vote had been expected this week, and Guterres has been pressing for one for more than a month. But this seems less and less likely over the short term because of the disagreement between the US and China.

"I am particularly worried about the lack of sufficient solidarity with developing countries -- both in equipping them to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, which risks spreading like wildfire, and to address the dramatic economic and social impacts," Guterres said.

One diplomat said there will probably not be a vote this week."Let's see if next week will bring something new," this diplomat said.

The stalemate could end quickly if the US and China find a compromise, one Western ambassador said. The WHO mention is just a side issue in a draft centered on support for a ceasefire in some 20 war or conflict zones around the world, this ambassador said.

As it stands, the resolution now has a blank space where the WHO mention is supposed to go and how to fashion it will be decided at the end of the negotiations. France and Tunisia could simply decide to scrap such a mention altogether, although this idea might be vetoed by China, with support from Russia.

Except for a virtual meeting on April 9, the Security Council has remained silent on the biggest global crisis since World War II.

China revises up Wuhan toll as Germany declares outbreak 'under control'

Yahoo – AFP, Jing Xuan Teng, with AFP bureaus, April 17, 2020

A worker disinfects the floor of a supermarket in Kosovo (AFP Photo/Armend NIMANI)

Wuhan (China) (AFP) - The Chinese city at the origin of the coronavirus outbreak revised up its death toll by 50 percent Friday, as global criticism mounted over China's handling of the deadly pandemic.

Since emerging from Wuhan late last year, the coronavirus has embarked on a deadly march across the planet, killing more than 145,000 people and wrecking the global economy with more than half of humanity -- 4.5 billion people -- trapped indoors.

But some countries across Europe are starting to slowly ease back weeks-old restrictions after deaths and infections showed signs of stabilising, and the German health minister said Friday his country's outbreak was "under control".

While President Donald Trump announced a phased reopening of the United States, the economic devastation was clear to see in China, where gross domestic product slammed into reverse for the first time since records began.

Wuhan's city government added 1,290 deaths to its toll, bringing the total to 3,869 after many dead were "mistakenly reported" or missed entirely, adding to growing global doubts over China's transparency.

Leaders in France and Britain joined Trump's broadsides against China, as two US media outlets reported suspicions the virus accidentally slipped out of a sensitive Wuhan laboratory that studied bats.

President Emmanuel Macron told the Financial Times it would be "naive" to think China had handled the pandemic well, adding: "There are clearly things that have happened that we don't know about."

Beijing hit back on Friday, insisting there had been no cover-up.

"There has never been any concealment, and we'll never allow any concealment," a foreign ministry spokesman said.

Life-and-death balance

World leaders are grappling with the question of when -- and how -- to reopen society, seeking a life-and-death balance between unfreezing stalled economies and preventing a deadly second coronavirus wave.

While Trump declared Thursday that the time had come for the "next front in our war" with a phased reboot of the US economy, others took the opposite path -- Japan, Britain and Mexico all expanded current restrictions.

Despite the United States suffering a staggering 4,500 deaths in the last 24 hours -- taking the national toll to almost 33,000 -- Trump proclaimed: "We're opening up our country."

The president's approach was a step back from previous hopes for a sudden reopening however, and state governors were given the freedom to set their own plans to resume business.

Lightly affected states can open "literally tomorrow", said Trump, while others would receive White House "freedom and guidance" to achieve that at their own pace.

In New York state for example -- where more than 11,500 have died -- Governor Andrew Cuomo extended a shutdown order until May 15.

In some of the world's most vulnerable economies, lockdown measures were starting to pinch.

Tobacco farmers in Zimbabwe feared a delayed start to normally busy auction season, the lifeblood for thousands of growers in impoverished rural regions.

"This year our harvest hasn't been good at all... just average," farmer Shaw Mutalepo told AFP, as workers in face masks crunched cured leaves into large bales.

"We might have a delay (in selling) just because of the lockdown," he added. "It will affect our preparations for the next season."

'Lost decade'

Meanwhile, there were more signs the global economy is imploding.

China reported Friday its GDP shrank 6.8 percent in the first quarter, the first contraction since quarterly growth data started in the early 1990s.

In the US, another 5.2 million workers lost their jobs, bringing the total number of newly unemployed to a staggering 22 million since mid-March.

John Williams, a top Federal Reserve official, predicted it would take "a year or two" if not longer for the US to recover from what the International Monetary Fund has termed the "Great Lockdown" battering the global economy.

The virus could spark another "lost decade" in Latin America, the IMF warned, while experts cautioned that freezing debt for poor countries will not save many developing world economies.

And in Europe, automobile sales shrank 55 percent in March, according to the industry's trade association.

'It's awful'

Some European countries -- such as hard-hit Spain and Italy -- were embarking on a long road back to normality, with Venice residents strolling around quiet canals stripped of their usual throngs of tourists.

Switzerland, Denmark and Finland were among those gradually re-opening shops and schools.

In Germany, select small shops will be allowed to reopen Monday and some children could soon return to school within weeks.

Infection rates there "have sunk significantly" and the outbreak is "under control", Health Minister Jens Spahn said Friday.

Germany's coronavirus deaths and infections have stood firmly below some of their worst-hit European neighbours, which experts say is in part thanks to widespread testing.

Spahn said Germany would produce up to 50 million masks a week starting in August, to fill a yawning gap in supplies prompted by the pandemic.

But Britain, which shut down later than continental Europe, extended its lockdown for at least three more weeks.

It announced close to 850 new deaths on Friday, a slight spike from previous days that saw fatalities start to draw down.

And in Russia, recorded infections topped 32,000 as President Vladmir Putin warned that "the risks surrounding the epidemic's spread are still very high, not just in Moscow but in many other Russian regions".

Around the world, people have come up with ingenious ways to bring back some semblance of normality -- and social connection -- to their upended lives.

In Rome an 18-year-old guitarist takes to his balcony every evening at sunset to play covers of Italian classics.

"We decided to lend a hand to Italians: a message of hope," Jacopo Mastrangelo told AFP from his patio.

"We are accustomed to always seeing Rome full, teeming with people. Now the grass is growing between the cobblestones, everything has been left abandoned, and we decided to help."

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China to expel US journalists as media freedom row grows

Yahoo – AFP, Laurent Thomet, with Shaun Tandon in Washington, March 18, 2020

Wall Street Journal reporters Josh Chin (right) and Philip Wen were expelled after an
op-ed headline in the newspaper that China deemed racist (AFP Photo/GREG BAKER)

Beijing (AFP) - China on Wednesday announced it would expel American journalists from three major US newspapers in one of the communist government's biggest crackdowns on the foreign press, escalating a bitter row over media freedoms.

The move against The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal came as the superpowers also feuded over the coronavirus pandemic, with US President Donald Trump provocatively branding it the "Chinese virus".

Beijing said the expulsions were in retaliation to Washington's decision to cut the number of Chinese nationals allowed to work for its state-run media on American soil.

"They are legitimate and justified self-defense in every sense," the foreign ministry said of the expulsions.

It said the journalists at the three newspapers must hand back their credentials within 10 days, and highlighted they would also not be able to work in the semi-autonomous cities of Hong Kong and Macau.

The Foreign Correspondents' Club of China (FCCC) said the move means at least 13 American journalists currently working in the country would be expelled.

Beijing also ordered the papers, as well as Voice of America and Time magazine, to declare in writing their staff, finances, operations and real estate in China -- rules similar to those recently imposed on Chinese state media by Washington.

The foreign ministry said these were "entirely necessary and reciprocal" moves that China was "compelled to take in response to the unreasonable oppression the Chinese media organizations experience in the US".

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Beijing was wrong to equate state-run 

Chinese media with independent US outlets (AFP Photo/NICHOLAS KAMM)

The row was ignited last month after China expelled three other Wall Street Journal reporters -- two Americans and one Australian -- over what it deemed a racist headline in the newspaper.

The headline, "China is the Real Sick Man of Asia", was on an opinion piece that the three journalists were not involved in writing.

Those were the first outright expulsions by China of a foreign journalist since 1998, according to the FCCC.

The row escalated as the US reclassified Chinese state-run media operating in the United States as foreign missions.

On Wednesday, the FCCC said it "deplores" the measure and warned: "There are no winners in the use of journalists as diplomatic pawns by the world's two pre-eminent economic powers."

US asks China to reconsider

Following the latest expulsions, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said China was wrong to equate its state-run media, which answer to Beijing, and independent US news outlets that can freely report and ask critical questions.

"I regret China's decision today to further foreclose the world's ability to conduct the free press operations that, frankly, would be really good for the Chinese people in these incredibly challenging global times, where more information, more transparency are what will save lives," Pompeo told reporters.

US President Donald Trump speaks during a daily press briefing on the

coronavirus pandemic (AFP Photo/Brendan Smialowski)

Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, called China's move a "grave mistake" and voiced hope that Washington and Beijing would quickly resolve the dispute to let journalists keep working.

The executive editor of The Washington Post, Marty Baron, said the move was "particularly regrettable because it comes in the midst of an unprecedented global crisis".

Matt Murray, editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, called it an "unprecedented" attack on press freedom.

Rights groups also slammed the move, with PEN America saying it was "stunningly misguided and a grave risk to public safety."

Human Rights Watch expressed alarm that the ban on the expelled US journalists extended to working in semi-autonomous Hong Kong, where the mini-constitution enshrines free speech.

The move is "further encroaching upon Hong Kong's limited freedom under the 'one country, two systems' arrangement", HRW said.

The coronavirus has already divided the US and China, with Trump and Pompeo repeatedly speaking of the "Chinese virus" or "Wuhan virus" -- a reference to the city where cases were first detected.

Beijing has condemned the use of those terms, saying it is "a kind of stigmatisation".

But Trump has defended his terminology, telling reporters: "It did come from China, so I think it's very accurate."

Theory that Coronavirus Escaped from a Lab Lacks Evidence

The pathogen appears to have come from wild animals, virologists say, and there are no signs of genetic manipulation in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.

The Scientist, Emily Makowski, Mar 5, 2020

Since the early days of the COVID-19 epidemic, theories have circulated about the origin of the novel coronavirus causing the disease, SARS-CoV-2. One prominent rumor is that it first escaped from a lab in Wuhan studying bat coronaviruses and then spread to the public. This theory has also evolved into claims that the virus was genetically engineered to be a bioweapon. But scientists say that while there’s not enough information to pinpoint where the virus came from, there is no evidence that it was created in a lab.

The lab-escape theory had been circulating on social media and various blogs for weeks, but gained considerable visibility in a New York Post article in late February. In it, Steven Mosher, a social scientist and the president of the Population Research Institute in Front Royal, Virginia, summarizes why he believes SARS-CoV-2 may have been accidentally spread by China’s National Biosafety Laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where researchers have studied bat coronaviruses.

In the article, Mosher describes several lines of reasoning, namely, that the lab is less than 10 miles away from the seafood market where a cluster of COVID-19 cases was first discovered, and that after the 2003 SARS outbreak, the SARS-CoV virus escaped from virology labs multiple times in China. He also describes how Chinese virologist and bioweapons expert Major General Chen Wei went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology with military scientists in January to study thenew virus, which Mosher sees as a form of damage control.

“The circumstantial evidence surrounding it is pretty compelling. . . . The idea that the epicenter of this epidemic would be just a few miles from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, which is where we know that dangerous pathogens are being kept and looked at as potential bioweapons, I think the odds against that are just astronomical,” Mosher tells The Scientist.

Dimitrios Paraskevis, an epidemiologist at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece, tells The Scientist that while it’s not possible to rule out the idea of lab escape, he believes that it is unlikely. “Any person who works in a lab must follow very strict safety regulations. It sounds to me very extraordinary that something happened and nobody took care about such an accident,” he says. The World Health Organization updated SARS surveillance guidelines in 2004 after the lab-based outbreaks, urging labs to follow proper biosafety procedures, and China replaced the director of its Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

One problem leading to a lot of apprehension and speculation about the new coronavirus is that scientists “don’t know what the actual source of the virus was,” Anthony Fehr, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Kansas, tells The Scientist. Additionally, researchers don’t know if SARS-CoV-2 immediately started to spread in humans after a single transmission from an animal, or if it took multiple zoonotic events between an infected animal population and humans.

Despite the question mark around the exact source of the disease, it does appear to have originally come from wildlife, according to a team of international public health scientists who wrote a statement published in The Lancet. An analysis of SARS-CoV-2 by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology suggests that the virus’s genome is 96 percent similar to a coronavirus found in bats.

Mosher agrees that animals were the likely origin. “That doesn’t mean [the virus] wasn’t collected, brought to the lab, and was being tested on in various ways, and escaped from the lab,” he says. Mosher also does not claim that China genetically engineered the virus. “I’m not saying this has been genetically engineered to be a bioweapon that’s escaped from the lab. . . . I’m just saying that [China is] collecting dangerous pathogens, [and] they have a history of letting them escape from the lab,” he says.

Transmission from an animal, with no lab experiment or genetic manipulation involved, fits best with what scientists know about how other coronaviruses have made the jump to humans. In the past, these viruses have spread through wild bats that infect another type of animal—an intermediate host—that then spreads it to humans. SARS-CoV, for example, was transmitted from bats to civets to humans, while camels were an intermediate host in MERS, according to Quanta. The civet version of SARS-CoV was 99.8 percent similar to the one found in humans—much more closely related than the bat and human varieties of SARS-CoV-2—so researchers believe the new coronavirus also infected another type of animal on its way from bats to humans. But they have not found a candidate so far, according to Nature.

This ability to move in between different animal hosts is a characteristic feature of coronaviruses, according to Paul McCray, a pulmonologist at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine whose lab studies coronaviruses. “It’s exactly what we’ve learned in studies of SARS in 2002 and 2003, and MERS in 2012. . . . So the concept that this is happening again should come as no surprise,” he says. “For people that work with these viruses, this is completely unsurprising. We don’t need to come up with farfetched theories when the genome sequences and the characteristics of these viruses support what we’re seeing.”

No signs of engineering in SARS-CoV-2 genome

In addition to the claim that a naturally evolved virus escaped from a lab by mistake, some conspiracy theories have posited that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered. In fact, researchers throughout the world, including in the US and China, have conducted research involving the creation of experimentally engineered hybrid coronaviruses. But there is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered, says Paraskevis, whose genomic analysis of the new virus was reported as a preprint in January.

RNA viruses, which include coronaviruses, “accumulate mutations at a rate one million times faster than human DNA [does]. . . . It gives them the ability to survive against an immune response,” Paraskevis says. While the new coronavirus does have some genetic differences to other known viruses due to mutations, “there’s no evidence that this is the result of a human experiment,” he says, adding that if the virus were engineered, scientists would expect to see additional genetic material in its genome. For example, an early bioRxiv preprint on SARS-CoV-2 found HIV-like genetic sequences, but online commenters pointed out that “the findings were at most a coincidence” and that research has since been retracted, reports STAT.

As there are still many unknowns about SARS-CoV-2, researchers worldwide are trying to uncover as much as they can about the virus. Chinese researchers “released the genomic sequence incredibly rapidly online. . . . They were very public in sharing the most important first piece of information” about it, McCray tells The Scientist. “The fact that scientists all over the world had access to that genomic sequence” made a lot of early research possible, he says.

Emily Makowski is a freelance writer based in Boston. Find her on Twitter @EmilyRMakowski.

"China is seeking to deflect criticism for its role in starting a global pandemic and not telling the world" by spreading "dangerous and ridiculous" conspiracy theories, a US State Department official said https://t.co/wBxj3p3Sjl pic.twitter.com/myx3OcoixS

— AFP news agency (@AFP) March 13, 2020

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