Top US scientist tells the media Wuhan lab was indeed collecting bat virus samples right around the time the pandemic started:
Scientist heard about Covid TWO WEEKS before Beijing warned the world
The revelation by Ian Lipkin, a professor at Columbia University honoured by China for work on the first Sars epidemic, undermines the official Beijing narrative on the origins.
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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.
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'.
He is head of a unit at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health, which won grants worth $1.34 million (£970,000) between 2018 and 2020 from EcoHealth Alliance, a charity that also funded controversial research into bat viruses at Wuhan Institute of Virology.
British 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'.
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.
'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.