Old video footage from the archives of a Chinese mouthpiece media has revealed that the Chinese scientists had found the novel coronavirus in a bat two years before the pandemic outbreak at a Wuhan lab.
A video that is being shared on the Internet taken from the archives of CCTV, a China-state media outlet, once gained prominence after the outbreak.
CCTV released a report in 2018 hailing a breakthrough that its scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had achieved while studying 'a novel coronavirus from bats'.
In the footage, which was aired on Chinese television, lead researcher from Wuhan Lab Shi Zhengli was quoted as saying that the strain contained 'novel coronavirus.'
Even though the video report was aired on state broadcaster CCTV in 2018 since the new coronavirus outbreak put Wuhan lab in a controversy, it has been reposted on the Internet.
The Wuhan lab has a collection of about 15,000 samples from bats and according to an NPR report, the lab has identified 400 wholly new coronaviruses.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology has been able to identify 50 samples it has collected from bats that been responsible for causing the 2002 SARS outbreak and the COVID 19 pandemic.
US funded Wuhan lab
Even as the US has launched a full-scale investigation, reports indicate that the United States has been funding the Wuhan lab.
The first grant was given to Wuhan lab in 2015 - a sum of $3.25 million over five years and last year the government approved another $3.7 million.
What is even more shocking is the fact that the Trump administration was aware that the Wuhan lab was a risky business.
According to a report by The Washington Post, the US Embassy officials from Beijing visited the Wuhan lab in 2018 and issued several warnings to Washington about the inadequate safety at the lab, which was conducting risky studies on coronaviruses from bats.
The US embassy repeatedly sent cables to Washington raising alarm and now these cables have fueled discussions in the US government on whether Wuhan lab was indeed the source of the pandemic - an accusation that China has denied and nobody has proof to prove this, just yet.
President Donald Trump, who has been insistent about a Chinese coverup has ordered all intelligence agencies comb-through every data possible to established whether China and the World Health Organization hide facts about the Coronavirus pandemic.
