[MAIL] Covid leaking from a laboratory in China and then going on to devastate the world has moved from a fringe theory to the US's official narrative of the pandemic.
Just this week, Beijing fired back at claims from the FBI that the virus did emerge from the now famous Wuhan Institute of Virology.
While the jury remains out on if Covid did indeed come from a Chinese lab, the last 100 years have seen dozens of similar incidents spark outbreaks, or narrowly avoid them.
From the world's last recorded smallpox death in Birmingham in the 70s, a Soviet cover up of 'Biological Chernobyl', to extinct polio being found in a Dutch sewer in November last year, lab leaks of pathogens are not as rare as you might think.
Here, MailOnline has created a map laying bare the biosecurity blunders and near misses across the world and highlighted just 10 of the most shocking incidents and near misses in lab leak history. |