Wuhan Institute of Virology

中国科学院武汉病毒研究所
Abbreviation	WIV
Predecessor	Wuhan Microbiology Laboratory South China Institute of Microbiology Wuhan Microbiology Institute Microbiology Institute of Hubei Province
Formation	1956
Founder	Chen Huagui, Gao Shangyin
Headquarters	Xiaohongshan, Wuchang District, Wuhan, Hubei
Coordinates	30°32′21.9″N 114°21′3.07″E / 30.539417°N 114.3508528°E / 30.539417; 114.3508528
Director-General	Wang Yanyi
Secretary of Party Committee	Xiao Gengfu[1]
Deputy Director-General	Gong Peng, Guan Wuxiang, Xiao Gengfu
Parent organization	Chinese Academy of Sciences
Website	whiov.cas.cn

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (WIV; Chinese: 中国科学院武汉病毒研究所) is a research institute on virology administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Located in Jiangxia District, Wuhan, Hubei, it opened mainland China's first biosafety level 4 (BSL–4) laboratory in 2015.^[2]

In January 2020, conspiracy theories circulated that the 2019-20 coronavirus pandemic originated from viruses engineered by the WIV, which were refuted on the basis of scientific evidence that the virus has natural origins.^{[3][4][5][6][7]}

More concerns were raised of an accidental leakage by the WIV, with alleged safety concerns reported by US State Department cables from 2018 in relation to WIV's research on bat coronaviruses.^[8] In April 2020, U.S. intelligence officials launched examinations into unverified reports the virus may have originated from the accidental exposure by WIV scientists studying natural coronaviruses in bats.^{[9][10][11][12]}

Leading virologists have disputed the idea that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the institute.^[13][14] The virologist Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which studies emerging infectious diseases, has noted estimates that 1-7 million people in Southeast Asia who live or work in proximity to bats are infected each year with bat coronaviruses.^[13][14] In an interview with Vox, Daszak comments, "There are probably half a dozen people that do work in those labs. So let's compare 1 million to 7 million people a year to half a dozen people; it's just not logical."^[14] Jonna Mazet, Professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Davis and director of the PREDICT project to monitor emerging viruses, has commented that staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were trained at US labs and follow high safety standards, and that "All of the evidence points to this not being a laboratory accident."^[13]

The WIV was founded in 1956 as the Wuhan Microbiology Laboratory under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). In 1961, it became the South China Institute of Microbiology, and in 1962 was renamed Wuhan Microbiology Institute. In 1970, it became the Microbiology Institute of Hubei Province when the Hubei Commission of Science and Technology took over the administration. In June 1978, it was returned to the CAS and renamed Wuhan Institute of Virology.^[15]

In 2015, the WIV's National Bio-safety Laboratory was completed at a cost of 300 million yuan ($44 million) in collaboration with the French government's CIRI lab, and was the first biosafety level 4 (BSL–4) laboratory to be built in mainland China.^[2][16] The establishment of the laboratory was partially funded by the U.S. government^[12] and took over a decade to complete from its conception in 2003.^[2]

The Laboratory has strong ties to the Galveston National Laboratory in the University of Texas.^[3] It also had strong ties with Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory until WIV staff scientists Xiangguo Qiu and her husband Keding Cheng, who were also remunerated by the Canadian government, were escorted from the Canadian lab for undisclosed reasons in July 2019.^[17]

The WIV was a topic of controversy during the early months of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Scientists such as U.S. molecular biologist Richard H. Ebright, who had expressed concern of previous escapes of the SARS virus at Chinese laboratories in Beijing and had been troubled by the pace and scale of China's plans for expansion into BSL–4 laboratories,^[2] called the Institute a "world-class research institution that does world-class research in virology and immunology" while he noted that the WIV is a world leader in the study of bat coronaviruses.^[3]

In 2005, a group including researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology published research into the origin of the SARS coronavirus, finding that China's horseshoe bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses.^[18] Continuing this work over a period of years, researchers from the Institute sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across China, isolating over 300 bat coronavirus sequences.^[19]

In 2015, an international team including two scientists from the Institute published successful research on whether a bat coronavirus could be made to infect HeLa. The team engineered a hybrid virus, combining a bat coronavirus with a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and mimic human disease. The hybrid virus was able to infect human cells.^[20][21]

In 2017, a team from the Institute announced that coronaviruses found in horseshoe bats at a cave in Yunnan contain all the genetic pieces of the SARS virus, and hypothesized that the direct progenitor of the human virus originated in this cave. The team, who spent five years sampling the bats in the cave, noted the presence of a village only a kilometer away, and warned of "the risk of spillover into people and emergence of a disease similar to SARS".^[19][22]

In December 2019, cases of pneumonia associated with an unknown coronavirus were reported to health authorities in Wuhan. The Institute checked its coronavirus collection and found the new virus was 96 percent identical to a sample its researchers had taken from horseshoe bats in southwest China.^[23]

As the virus spread worldwide, the Institute continued its investigation. In February 2020, the New York Times reported that a team led by Shi Zhengli at the Institute were the first to identify, analyze and name the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), and upload it to public databases for scientists around the world to understand,^[24][25] and publishing papers in Nature.^[26] In February 2020, the Institute applied for a patent in China for the use of remdesivir, an experimental drug owned by Gilead Sciences, which the Institute found inhibited the virus in vitro;^[27] in a move that raised concerns regarding intellectual property rights.^[28] The WIV said it would not exercise its new Chinese patent rights "if relevant foreign companies intend to contribute to the prevention and control of China’s epidemic".^[29]

In January 2020, conspiracy theories emerged that the Institute was as a source for the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic as a result of allegations of bioweapon research,^{[30][5][6][7][4]} a concept that some scientists have rejected, noting that the Institute was not suitable for bioweapon research, that most countries had abandoned bioweapons as fruitless, and that there was no evidence that the virus was genetically engineered.^{[3][30][5][6][7][4]} In February 2020, virus expert and global lead coronavirus investigator Trevor Bedford observed that "The evidence we have is that the mutations [in the virus] are completely consistent with natural evolution".^[31]

During January and February 2020, the Institute was subject to further theories, and concerns that it was the source of the outbreak through accidental leakage,^[32] which it publicly argued was not the case.^[33] Members of the Institute's research teams were also the subject of various theories,^[34][35] including Shi, who made various public statements defending the Institute.^[36] While Ebright refuted several of theories regarding the WIV, he told BBC China that this did not represent the possibility of the virus being "completely ruled out" from entering the population due to a laboratory accident.^[32]

On March 11, Scientific American reported that Shi Zhengli, the lead researcher at WIV, started investigation on mishandling of experimental materials in the lab records, especially during disposal. She also tried to cross-check the novel coronavirus genome with the genetic information of other bat coronaviruses her team had collected. The result showed none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves.^[37] Immunologist Vincent Racaniello stated that virus leaking theory "reflect a lack of understanding of the genetic make-up of Sars-CoV-2 and its relationship to the bat virus". He states that the bat virus researched in the institution "would not have been able to infect humans – the human Sars-CoV-2 has additional changes that allows it to infect humans."^[38]

The lab leakage claims entered mainstream media in United States in April.^[39] According to an April 2020 opinion piece by Josh Rogin in The Washington Post, U.S. officials sent to the WIV in 2018 had dispatched two diplomatic cables back to Washington which "warned about safety and management weaknesses at the WIV lab" and "also warns that the lab's work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic."^[8] Rogin's piece cited that, prior to the pandemic, some virologists questioned whether experiments on creating novel coronaviruses in a laboratory (as was done in North Carolina)^[20] justified the potential risk of accidental release.^[21] The original article, which lacks opinion from virologists, drew criticism from several scientists including Columbia University virologist Angela Rasmussen who described Rogin's piece as "irresponsible".^[39] Various researchers contacted by NPR concluded that it's highly unlikely that the pandemic virus had accidentally escaped from a laboratory.^[40]

During a 15 April 2020 White House news conference, US President Donald Trump said the U.S. government is trying to determine if the COVID-19 virus emanated from the WIV,^[41][42] and the Trump Administration subsequently launched examinations into the unverified reports that the virus may have originated from accidental exposure of scientists studying natural coronaviruses in bats at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.^[9] The new concerns were over accidental exposure of researchers studying bat coronaviruses, as opposed to earlier theories about artificially laboratory-manufactured coronaviruses.^[11][12] Regarding the origin of the COVID-19 virus, Deborah Birx, the Coronavirus Response Coordinator for the Trump Administration's White House Coronavirus Task Force, states on CBS Face the Nation that she does not know precisely where it originated, and right now, "the general consensus is animal to human".^[43]

The Institute contains the following research centers:^[44]

• Center for Emerging Infectious Disease
• Chinese Virus Resources and Bioinformatics Center
• Center of Applied and Environmental Microbiology
• Department of Analytical Biochemistry and Biotechnology
• Department of Molecular Virology

• Shi Zhengli, lead virologist.
• Misinformation related to the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic

• Official website
• Wuhan Institute of Virology Communist Party Representative website

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