The Chinese lab that the FBI believes likely leaked Covid-19 may have also released a ‘highly evolved’ strain of polio in 2014.
A bombshell new study suggests that this polio strain, which infected a four-year-old boy amid a wider viral outbreak in China’s Anhui province, is ’99 percent’ identical to a polio variant that was stored 200 miles away, during that same time period, at the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Researchers at France’s Pasteur Institute cannot say with certainty where this strain, dubbed ‘WIV14,’ originated. But they insisted two possibilities ‘must be explored’ — including the chance that WIV14 polio originated within the Wuhan institute itself.
‘The findings underscore the shocking unsafe state of global virology research,’ Harvard-trained molecular biologist Dr Richard Ebright, who was not involved with the research, told DailyMail.com.
The Pasteur researchers suspect that WIV14 polio, so named by the Wuhan scientists who first catalogued the strain, likely evolved from a well-preserved, 1950s strain of the virus used — almost exclusively — in vaccine production and laboratory settings.
The Wuhan lab’s rough proximity to Anhui province and its burgeoning reputation for lax safety protocols have also added weight to this possible explanation.
If true, the theory would join a chorus of outcry over safety lapses at China’s state-run infectious disease lab, whose US funding was cut last year by the Biden White House amid ongoing scrutiny on Capitol Hill over its role in the Covid-19 pandemic.
Although a global vaccination regime implemented across more than half a century has largely succeeded in eradicating the scourge of polio, cases have bloomed in conflict zones over the past few years, including Gaza, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
According to the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO), 125 positive samples of polio appeared in Afghanistan last year, to China’s west, with 34 more cases in 2024.
And for the first time a decade, polio remerged in the United States in 2022, with the virus being detected in sewage over 70 times during testing in in New York.
The Pasteur Institute’s researchers compared DNA from the whole genome of the WIV14 polio strain against the ‘Saukett A’ strain used to make many polio vaccines.
They found only 70 nucleotides (nt) of difference between the two strains — across genomes containing over seven thousand of the fundamental DNA building blocks.
