Shi Zhengli, a virologist specializing in coronaviruses who was dubbed the “Bat Woman” because of her extensive work with the infection-spreading animals, appeared on a list of 583 candidates for the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) on Thursday.
Seventy-nine of those candidates will be elected to membership in CAS before the end of the year.
The South China Morning Post (SCMP) noted that Shi’s nomination is bound to be controversial because she is indisputably a leader in her field, having played an important role in containing the SARS outbreak of 2002, but she is also a key figure in discussions of the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus.
Shi’s government has obstructed the investigation of the virus’s origins at every turn: lying repeatedly to the world about the nature of the virus, punishing doctors who tried to sound early warnings about it, destroying vital data, stage-managing the World Health Organization’s fact-finding trip to the outbreak zone in Wuhan, and even petulantly inventing a crackpot conspiracy theory that the Wuhan virus was created by the U.S. military in a Maryland laboratory.
Shi’s position as director of infectious diseases at the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) put her at the center of the Wuhan coronavirus controversy, as the SCMP recalled:
At the early stage of the pandemic in 2020, Shi published research describing the similarity of the Covid-19 pathogen to coronaviruses carried by certain bats and suggested possible evolution paths. But some US officials, including then-president Donald Trump, suggested that the Covid-19 [Wuhan coronavirus] pathogen had been leaked from Shi’s laboratory in Wuhan, where samples of deadly coronaviruses were stored.
Shi strongly denied the allegation, saying the lab had no contact with the virus until it was first detected in the initial outbreak in Wuhan, and dismissed rumors that an infected member of her team had triggered the pandemic.
She also called for Trump to apologise and condemned the US government’s decision to stop funding her joint research with the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance.
Shi’s work appeared to be very influential to the World Health Organization (WHO), which in 2021 seemed to accept her theory that the Wuhan coronavirus probably originated in bats, jumped to another animal carrier, and eventually infected humans.
In the years since then, more evidence has accumulated that the virus could have indeed escaped from Shi’s WIV, while evidence for natural transmission from animals to humans has proven elusive.
The House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic concluded in July that there was “a coordinated effort between public health officials in the United States government and expert scientists to craft a narrative that would advance the zoonotic origin of COVID-19 in order to protect the Chinese government from any potential criticism and repercussions.”
WATCH — NBC: “Bat Woman” at Wuhan Lab “Has Multiple Connections with Military Officials”
As part of that investigation, the subcommittee discovered some correspondence between Western scientists that mentioned Shi Zhengli’s work on modifying the SARS virus in rather colorful terms. The scientists, who wrote an influential but highly questionable paper advancing the “proximal origin” (natural origin) theory of the Wuhan coronavirus’s origins, were horrified to discover that one of Shi’s scholarly papers amounted to a “how-to manual for building the Wuhan coronavirus in a laboratory.”
“F**k, this is bad,” one of the scientists remarked. They went on to argue for proximal origin anyway. The paper they produced was frequently invoked by Chinese Communist officials and U.S. media to ridicule the lab leak theory – even though, as the Wall Street Journal noted in July, it is increasingly clear that the authors were not truly confident of the natural origin theory they were pushing.
Some of the gentler critics of Shi’s work theorize that she might not have deliberately created the Wuhan coronavirus, but its earliest version could have traveled from remote caves to the WIV in bats she collected for her work and then inadvertently infected laboratory workers.
The tide turned strongly enough in favor of the lab leak theory in 2023 that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services suspended all funding to the WIV, ostensibly because it refused to provide sufficient documentation of its safety protocols. The U.S. government and academic institutions are still finding ways to send millions of dollars to China for dangerous and ethically dubious research.
The authors of the proximal origin paper cited a common reason for giving China a pass in their correspondence: the fear among international health organizations that Beijing will refuse to cooperate with research or crisis management if the Communist government feels angry or insulted.
Elevating Shi Zhengli to the Chinese Academy of Sciences will be seen by the regime as certification of its version of the history of the Wuhan coronavirus. Credentials carry a great deal of weight in international circles, so the odds of other scientists questioning Shi’s statements will become even lower.
