> It emerged last week that the team had not even asked to see the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s online database, locked since September 2019 and taken down altogether in the spring of 2020. That database is known to contain 22,000 samples, mostly of viruses, 16,000 of them from bats. These include eight viruses very closely related to the virus causing the pandemic but whose genome sequences have not been published. They were collected in 2015 from a disused mineshaft, a thousand miles away, where in 2012 six men fell ill with a disease very like Covid.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/15/world-health-org...