In a scientific article in Virologica Sinica, the official journal of the Chinese Society of Microbiology, the authors explained the process for artificially engineering a monkeypox virus. The journal article was submitted by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Center for Biosafety Mega-Science, the State Key Laboratory of Virology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It was published by Editor-in-Chief Professor Zheng-Li Shi, who is the Director for the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Zheng-Li Shi, also known as the “bat woman,” has been deeply implicated in the suspected lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that may be traced to the ongoing worldwide Covid-19 outbreak. The New York Times, in a 2021 article, profiled Dr. Shi and highlighted doubt that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is blameless for the origination of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Years later, those doubts still linger about the Wuhan lab, fueled in part by the Biden administration‘s inability to issue a definitive statement on the matter.