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It is easy to forget that Chinese researchers from Wuhan discovered the origins of the 2002 SARS outbreak. In a remote cave in the southwestern province of Yunnan, virologists identified a colony of horseshoe bats with virus strains that jumped to humans and went on to kill hundreds of people around the world. They made their discovery in 2017 â almost 15 years after the first SARS outbreak.
Around the same time as the researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were searching for the bats, another group of Chinese researchers were working on a far less credible theory â that SARS had been weaponised by foreign countries and introduced to China. The claim was published in a 2015 book,