'The majority never come to the attention of larger organisations because they don't evolve into pandemics.'
'Outbreaks of infectious disease occur continuously worldwide,' he said. Prof Lipkin told this paper he had no 'new substantive comments' to make. 'If they've got hundreds of bat samples that are coming in, and some of them aren't characterised, how would they know whether this virus was or wasn't in this lab? They wouldn't,' he said in June. Yet Prof Lipkin admitted his view changed after learning that high-risk experiments on bat coronaviruses were carried out by Wuhan scientists in low-biosafety labs. He is head of a unit at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, which won grants worth $1.34 million (£970,000) between 20 from EcoHealth Alliance, a charity that also funded controversial research into bat viruses at Wuhan Institute of Virology.īritish scientist Peter Daszak, the charity's $460,368- a-year (£332,118) president, played a central role in labelling concerns over the possibility of a laboratory incident sparking the pandemic as 'conspiracy theory'.
The eminent expert condemned blaming of China, praised its efforts to control the outbreak and co-authored a hugely influential commentary in Nature Medicine journal that ruled out plausibility of 'any type of laboratory-based scenario'. Prof Lipkin, who caught Covid-19 soon after his return to the United States, was a key figure in the fierce debate over origins of the virus and attempts to stifle the lab-leak hypothesis by the scientific establishment. He predicted the new virus would cause fewer deaths than Sars, which killed 774 people after emerging in 2002 – although warned of the potential for a pandemic. The Caixin report was later wiped from the internet.ĭuring his trip, Prof Lipkin – a famed virus-hunter who acted as consultant on the film Contagion, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Matt Damon – met Chinese premier Li Keqiang and prominent scientists to discuss the disease. In reality, the virus was so rampant by that date that journalists reported that a private lab in Guangzhou had 'assembled a nearly complete viral genome sequence' and, seeing the pathogen's similarity to Sars, passed the data to the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. Prof Lipkin's claim flies in the face of Beijing's narrative that a heroic doctor in Wuhan was first to report the new virus on December 27 after seeing a case in her hospital the previous day.