The Wuhan lab at the heart of the US-China coronavirus spat

US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have both claimed that there is evidence the pathogen came from the lab in Wuhan

The Chinese laboratory accused by top American officials of being the source of the coronavirus pandemic conducts research on the world’s most dangerous diseases.

US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have both claimed that there is evidence the pathogen came from the lab in Wuhan — the city where the disease was first detected late last year.

But the World Health Organisation said Washington had offered no evidence to support the “speculative” claims, and scientists believe the coronavirus jumped from animals to humans, possibly at a Wuhan market selling wild animals.

The top US epidemiologist Anthony Fauci has echoed the WHO’s statement, telling National Geographic that all evidence so far “strongly indicates” a natural origin.

China has strongly denied the allegations, but speculation and conspiracy theories have persisted.

Here are some key questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology:

What do its researchers do?

Work by the lab’s scientists helped to shed light on the COVID-19 pathogen in the early days of the outbreak in Wuhan.

In February, they published work concluding that the new virus shared a 79.6% sequence identity to the SARS coronavirus, and that it was 96%identical at the whole-genome level to a coronavirus found in bats.

This file photo taken on February 23, 2017 shows workers next to a cage with mice (R) inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, the capital of China´s Hubei province. Photo: AFP