An Australian endocrinologist says there are numerous ways Covid-19 could have been leaked from a Wuhan laboratory as a theory about such a scenario gains traction again globally.
The source of SARS-Cov2 has been continually debated, with US President Joe Biden last month ordering an intelligence report on the topic, despite a World Health Organization (WHO) team travelling to Wuhan to investigate earlier this year.
Nikolai Petrovsky, a Professor of Medicine at Adelaide’s Flinders University, told Q+A he believes the theory that the virus was leaked from a laboratory has merit.
“The only way to discount the lab leak theory is to prove the alternative, which is that this came from an intermediate animal source,” he said.
“No such animal source has been found.”
Petrovsky said there were numerous ways the coronavirus could've been leaked, many of which could have been an accident.
"We've put forward a number of different scenarios by which this could happen," he said.
"It ranges from the idea that a researcher who's collecting samples from, say, bat caves may have themselves got infected in the process of the collection and then travelled back to the lab in Wuhan not knowing they were infected.
"They could innocently have gone back to the lab and then started the outbreak by infecting someone else in the lab or their family."
Petrovsky said that scenario would be the "simplest explanation" but there are other plausible ways too.
"We also know they weren't just collecting these viruses in the bat caves but also culturing them in the labs and when you do that, you're adapting the virus and that can make the virus much more prone to infecting humans.
"And then accidentally you touch a plate, and you touch your mouth - that's all it takes to infect yourself. It wouldn't be the first time."
He added the infection didn't have to take place at the lab itself too for the theory to work.
"They [could not] dispose of the waste properly from the laboratory appropriately so they don't inactivate the waste, it goes to a rubbish dump, it gets picked up by an animal and they infect a human or a human in the rubbish collection or processing picks it up from the waste.
“There’s a lot of different routes that could be involved in a lab leak-type scenario,” he added.
Petrovsky's view is in stark contrast to that of Professor Dominic Dwyer, who was part of the WHO team sent to Wuhan.
Dwyer told Q+A back in March that it was “extremely unlikely” the virus could have been spread via a lab leak and pointed to animals as the more plausible source.
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