‘This virus could create a highly extremely threatening new bioweapons agent and pandemic pathogen,’ a molecular biologist said.
Chinese researchers, led by a virologist whose work had fueled concerns about a possible COVID-19 lab leak, have discovered a new bat coronavirus similar to the one that causes COVID-19 that is capable of infecting humans.
The virus, called HKU5-CoV-2, can enter human cells through the ACE2 receptor, the same gateway for the SARS-CoV-2 virus that sparked a global pandemic five years ago, according to a study recently published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Cell.
The lead researcher is Shi Zhengli, who, for years, led work on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab that has been under scrutiny amid the ongoing questions about the origins of COVID-19.
The researchers collected nearly 1,000 anal swabs from pipistrellus bats across five Chinese provinces and took them to the state-owned Wuhan research institute.
The virus belongs to a distinct lineage of coronaviruses that also include the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome virus. Lab experiments indicate this virus strain may infect a wide range of mammals. The HKU5-CoV-2 has the potential to jump from one species to another, researchers said, noting the recent detection of viral sequences closely related to HKU5-CoV in farmed minks.
The virus doesn’t enter human cells as readily as the SARS-CoV-2 virus, suggesting the risk of its “emergence in human populations should not be exaggerated,” the paper states. It also identified antibodies and antiviral drugs targeting the virus.
Findings about the virus raised concerns from Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and laboratory director at Rutgers University’s Waksman Institute of Microbiology, who has been critical of the Wuhan Institute’s virus experiments.
“In nature, this virus poses minimal threat to humans,” he told The Epoch Times on Feb. 25.
“However, laboratory enhancement of transmissibility or pathogenicity, this virus could create a highly extremely threatening new bioweapons agent and pandemic pathogen.”
China is currently experiencing a surge of human metapneumovirus cases while the regime continues to resist international probes of the origin of COVID-19.
In January, the CIA became the third U.S. executive agency to back the theory that the SARS-CoV-2 virus might have come from a Chinese lab.
By Eva Fu
