China has demanded that its laboratory in Wuhan be awarded the prestigious Nobel prize for its contribution to the research of the coronavirus.
In a recent press conference, China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry’s spokesperson Zhau Lijian said that China’s Wuhan Lab deserved a Nobel Prize in Medicine for studying the coronavirus. The minister’s statement comes at the heels of the lab being nominated for China’s top science award.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences selected the Wuhan Institute of Virology for its ‘Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement Prize’ in 2021 for its role in identifying the genome of the virus.
There have been several hypothesis regarding the Wuhan lab as the potential source of the SARS-CoV-2. Apart from global media, a few of Chinas own virologists also claimed that China was experimenting with bats in order to form bioweapon which accidentally might have escaped. They have repeatedly said the coronavirus was not man-made or leaked from a lab. However, there is no concrete evidence yet supporting the claims.
China has now been trying to put blame on the United States for the devastating pandemic after the US National Institutes for Health (NIH) published a study that showed at least seven people in five states were infected with Sars-CoV-2 weeks before the country reported its first official cases. Zeng Guang, the chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, has demanded the second phase of investigation into the origins of Covid-19 should be conducted in the United States.
Among the Chinese virologist, Dr. Li-Meng Yan was the first persons to claim that the coronavirus was leaked from the Wuhan lab. On responding to the demand for Nobel Prixe Yan to News 18, she said more and more evidence coming out, people are realising that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in Wuhan, and the labs involved in the gain-of-function modification of the virus.
While reacting to these claims, Zhau Lijian in an press conference had said, The genome sequence of Covid-19 was first identified by Chinese scientists, but that does not mean Wuhan is the source of the coronavirus, nor can it be inferred that the coronavirus was made by Chinese scientists,”
Meanwhile, social media users have sharply reacted to such a demand with netizens criticising the ministry for such a claim saying the Chinese Communist Party has outdone itself this time.Users also took a dig at the Chinese authorities on social media platform Twitter, saying “If Wuhan Lab in China deserves Nobel Prize for Medicine according to China; then ISIS deserves the Nobel peace prize too.”
Other user tweeted :-
