'Covid was man-made virus', claims former Wuhan Lab Scientist in his new book 'The Truth About Wuhan'

New Delhi: In what appears to be an astonishing revelation, a US-based scientist who previously worked at a controversial research lab in Wuhan, China, has claimed that COVID-19 was a “man-made virus” that leaked from the facility.

The New York Post reported on the two-year-old Covid leak from the state-funded and run Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), citing US-based researcher Andrew Huff’s remark in the British publication The Sun.

Epidemiologist Huff, in his most recent book, “The Truth About Wuhan,” claims that the pandemic was brought on by the US government’s funding of coronaviruses in China.  Huff’s book excerpts have featured in the UK tabloid The Sun.

Huff is reportedly a former vice president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based non-profit organisation that researches infectious diseases, according to the New York Post article.

The report suggests Huff alleges in his book that China’s gain-of-function experiments were carried out with insufficient security, leading to a leak at the Wuhan lab.

With both Chinese government officials and lab staff disputing that the virus originated there, the Wuhan lab has been the focus of heated discussions on the origins of COVID.

“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.

The organisation has established close ties with the Wuhan lab and has been researching various coronaviruses in bats for more than ten years with support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The NIH is the main US government organisation in charge of biological 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. “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.

Read all the Latest News , Trending News , Cricket News , Bollywood News , India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook , Twitter and Instagram .