Andrew Huff, a US-based scientist who worked at a controversial research lab in Wuhan, China, has stated that COVID-19 was a “man-made virus” that leaked from the facility.
COVID has leaked two years ago from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a state-run and funded research facility, according to news agency ANI, citing a New York Post article. The statement in the British newspaper The Sun by US-based researcher Andrew Huff was mentioned in the article.
Huff claims in his most recent book, “The Truth About Wuhan,” that the pandemic was caused by the US government’s funding of coronaviruses in China. The UK tabloid The Sun published excerpts from epidemiologist Andrew Huff’s book.
According to the New York Post, Huff claims in his book that China’s gain-of-function experiments were conducted with inadequate security, resulting in a leak at the Wuhan lab.
Huff is a former vice president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organization based in New York that studies infectious diseases, according to the New York Post.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, the Wuhan lab has been the site of heated debates about the origins of COVID. Both Chinese government officials and laboratory workers have denied that the virus originated in China.
“Foreign laboratories did not have adequate control measures in place for ensuring proper biosafety, biosecurity, and risk management, which ultimately resulted in the lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Andrew Huff, a spokesman for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, reportedly said.
The organization has been studying several coronaviruses in bats for more than a decade, with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and has developed close ties with the Wuhan lab. According to the report, the NIH is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research.
Huff stated that the non-profit worked for many years with the Wuhan lab to develop the “best existing methods to engineer bat coronaviruses to attack other species.”
“China knew this was a genetically engineered agent from the start,” Huff wrote. “The transfer of dangerous biotechnology to the Chinese is the fault of the US government.” “What I saw terrified me,” he told The Sun, according to The New York Post. “All we were doing was handing them bioweapon technology.”
