Why the United States ordered an investigation into the Wuhan lab as a possible source of COVID-19

The most substantiated and supported hypothesis since the outbreak of the pandemic has been that the coronavirus has passed from animals to humans, possibly in Wuhan, China, where the first outbreak was recorded. Is that A year ago, the idea that the coronavirus could have escaped from a Chinese laboratory seemed crazy, one more chapter of a crazy conspiracy theory … But now everything has changed and the States- United demand to study it.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is home to a maximum security laboratory which is one of the few in the world with biosafety level 4 (i.e. it houses samples of very dangerous microorganisms, such as Ebola or smallpox). Although there is no evidence to support the suggestion that the new coronavirus escaped from there, scientists say ruling it out completely will be complicated and take time.

The alarm was raised by Anthony Fauci himself, the White House’s senior medical adviser, before a Senate appropriations subcommittee. While asserting that the historical basis for pandemics that evolve naturally from an animal reservoir is extremely strong, he warned, “But nobody knows, not even me, 100% right now, which is why we are in favor of continuing to investigate “.

In the same line, he pronounced Céline Gounder, infectious disease expert who served on the advisory board of Biden’s COVID-19 transition team. Even though the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the least likely source of the outbreak, “it requires further investigation,” he said last Thursday in an interview with NPR. “And to say that it needs more research doesn’t mean the virus has actually leaked from a lab, but we need to investigate and find out because it really does have implications for how we’re going to prevent the next pandemic, ”he said. -he declares.

As Gounder explains, at first there was confusion and conspiracy theories and attacks on China intertwined, but now that the time has passed and there are more tools to analyze, the hypothesis that a laboratory accident has occurred “is certainly possible”.

Of course, these are not just hypotheses, the infectious disease expert explained that the idea makes sense because it has now been discovered that in November 2019, three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology who were working on the coronavirus were hospitalized with symptoms that today, from a distance, could well have been COVID-19 … Gounder explained that it could also be flu symptoms or something else, but they’re obviously compatible with COVID-19. “We do not have enough information on these three cases, and this is something that needs to be investigated,” he insisted.

The new revelation from the US intelligence services provides key information: November 2019. This date is important because by the time scientists at the Wuhan laboratory fell ill with symptoms similar to the coronavirus, the first ones also appeared on these days. COVID- 19 cases in the Chinese city. In fact, Beijing reported the first case of a sick person on December 8, 2019.

China has been reluctant to share information allowing experts to better investigate and uncover the origin of this pandemic, which has killed more than 3.5 million people worldwide.

In the interview with NPR, Gounder explained that it’s critical to investigate the lab’s safety protocols and have access to all of their records: what experiments were they doing exactly? Was there any other disease in the group? What tests were performed on these three sick researchers? Have specimens been kept so that we can see again if it was COVID or something else?

In addition, he said that it was necessary to analyze the samples of blood banks stored before November 2019, “to see if there was anything circulating before”.

Of course, the scientist warns, the big challenge is to get the Chinese regime to cooperate because there will be no definitive answer to all these questions without your help.

Biden listened to experts, joined their claims, and ordered U.S. intelligence services to push for a “final conclusion” on how the pandemic began. The President requested responses within 90 days.

“There is a lot of work. I don’t know if 90 days is enough,” Gounder warned.

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