Ex-scientist at Wuhan lab says COVID virus was made by humans: Epidemiologist David Huff

An American researcher who formerly worked at a notorious lab in Wuhan, China has made what seems to be a shocking admission: COVID-19 was a "man-made virus" that escaped. Earlier this week, the New York Post quoted US-based researcher Andrew Huff's comment in the British daily The Sun, in which he claimed that COVID was released two years ago from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a state-run and sponsored research centre in China.

Epidemiologist David Huff writes in his new book, "The Truth About Wuhan," that the US government funded coronaviruses in China, which led to the epidemic. A British newspaper called "The Sun" has published excerpts from Huff's book.

The New York Post claims that Huff is the former vice president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit that focuses on infectious disease research.

According to the New York Post, Huff says in his book that a leak at the Wuhan facility was the consequence of insufficient security during China's gain-of-function tests.

There has been much back and forth over whether or not COVID really began at the Wuhan facility, with both Chinese government authorities and lab staff rejecting any connection to the city.

"Foreign laboratories did not have the adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, ultimately resulting in the lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology," Andrew Huff, said in his book.For more than a decade, the organisation has been studying several coronaviruses in bats with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and has forged close ties to the Wuhan lab.The NIH is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research.

Huff, who worked at EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2016, stated that the non-profit assisted the Wuhan lab for many years in developing the "best existing methods to engineer bat coronaviruses to attack other species"

"China knew from day one that this was a genetically engineered agent," Huff wrote. 

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"The US government is to blame for the transfer of dangerous biotechnology to the Chinese. "I was terrified by what I saw," he told The Sun, as per New York Post.

"We were just handing them bioweapon technology."The Post also reports that according to a recent investigation published by ProPublica/Vanity Fair, the WIV is home to China`s riskiest coronavirus research.

This research institute has been under immense pressure from the ruling Chinese Communist Party to produce scientific breakthroughs to raise its global status despite the lack of resources.

(With inputs from ANI)