New Delhi: Even as the Chinese Wuhan lab has remained at the center of controversy since the outbreak of COVID-19, the Chinese ministry has now gone ahead to demand that its lab be allowed to contribute to the research of coronavirus. to be awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize. .
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhou Lijian insisted that China’s Wuhan lab deserves the Nobel Prize in Medicine for studying the coronavirus.
The minister’s statement comes amidst the lab being nominated for China’s top science award. The Chinese Academy of Sciences selected the Wuhan Institute of Virology for the ‘Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement Award’ in 2021 for its role in identifying the genome of the virus.
Several hypotheses have been made about the Wuhan lab as a possible source of SARS-CoV-2. Apart from the global media, some of China’s own virologists also claimed that China was experimenting with bats to create bioweapons that may have survived by mistake. He has repeatedly said that the coronavirus was not man-made or leaked from a lab. However, there is no solid evidence yet to support the claims.
Among the Chinese virologists, Dr. Li-Meng Yan was the first person to claim that the coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan lab. Responding to News18’s demand for a Nobel Prize prize, he said that more and more evidence is emerging, people are realizing that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in Wuhan, and that laboratories are testing the virus’s function- Off-function modifications were involved. .
Responding to these claims, at a press conference, Zhou Lijian said, “The genome sequence of COVID-19 was first identified by Chinese scientists, but this does not mean that Wuhan is the source of the coronavirus, nor It can be inferred that the coronavirus was created by Chinese scientists.”
If those who published the first high-quality viral genome are accused of creating the virus, Professor Luc Montagnier, who first discovered the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), is the culprit of AIDS rather than awarded the Nobel Prize. It will be believed, and Mr. Louis Pasteur, the discoverer of microbes, will be held responsible for disease-causing bacteria around the world. By analogy, the team in Wuhan should instead be awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their research on Covid-19,” Lijian said.
Meanwhile, social media users have reacted sharply to such a demand and netizens criticized the ministry for such a claim, saying that the Communist Party of China has outdone itself this time. Users also took a dig at Chinese officials on social media platform Twitter, saying, “If the Wuhan lab in China deserves the Nobel Prize for Medicine, according to China, then ISIS deserves the Nobel Peace Prize too.”
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