Wuhan Laboratory Crash Theory As Coronavirus Origin Leaves Conspiratorial Ground | Society

The world already knows that COVID-19 is transmitted primarily through the air and indoors, which affects older people and men the most. He has proven that masks make a lot of sense, even if they are not foolproof, and he has seen how, in record time, the pharmaceutical industry has managed to develop a large and powerful offering of vaccines to combat it. What the world still does not know in May 2021 is where, when and how exactly this new coronavirus appeared, which caused the worst pandemic in a century and which, since becoming known in December 2020, has harvested nearly of 3.5 million lives.

The first outbreak was detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan, and those affected appeared to be linked to a live animal market. The jump of the virus from animals to humans there or elsewhere has been the main hypothesis since the start of the pandemic. The alternative, that the virus, of natural origin, has passed from animal to human at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV, for its acronym in English), a laboratory in the same city that studies SARS viruses , and a leak was recorded. Accidental, it had been rejected as a practically conspiracy theory, which few scientists approved and which had, among the leaders, the worst ambassador: Donald Trump. The then US president had built a reputation for spreading lies and peppered his comments with attacks on Xi Jinping’s regime and the World Health Organization. Confusing this accidental possibility with the deliberate manufacture of the virus as a biological weapon has also damaged its credibility.

Today, however, the laboratory accident theory has left the fringes of narrative to enter the realm of verisimilitude. On the 13th, a group of 18 scientists from elite universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Yale published an open letter in the magazine Science asking that the hypothesis be considered “seriously” until there is enough data to rule it out. On Monday, when asked by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergology and Infectious Diseases, if he still believed the virus had developed naturally, he replied, “The truth is, no. I am not convinced, we must continue to investigate what happened in China ”.

And this Wednesday, President Joe Biden himself issued a statement stressing that both hypotheses are possible. As soon as he arrived at the White House, he says, he commissioned intelligence services for a report on the origin of the coronavirus he received earlier this month. The intelligence community reached a consensus around “two probable scenarios”, that of animal-human contact and the laboratory accident, but did not come to a definitive conclusion. “While two elements of the intelligence community lean towards the first scenario and another towards the last – each with low or moderate confidence – most elements do not believe that there is enough information to determine which one is. most likely. The other “. Thus, he asked his agents to redouble their efforts and deliver a study as final as possible within 90 days.

What happened between the climate of opinion of 2020 and that of today has to do with the recently published information on the diseases of some laboratory researchers, and the link of this center with the deaths of miners in Southeast China in 2012. But, above all, it has to do with the passage of time. A year and a half after the appearance of the virus, its true origin remains unconfirmed, which forces us to leave open alternative hypotheses to the jump from animal to human. In addition, Beijing has so handcuffed investigations into the end of the WHO mission that its poor conclusions, presented in February, have further fueled mistrust.

Last Sunday, the day before Fauci made the aforementioned statements, The Wall Street Journal published, citing an intelligence report, that three researchers from the Wuhan laboratory fell ill in the fall of 2019 and required hospital treatment, although in China it is not uncommon to visit hospitals for common or seasonal illnesses. The Donald Trump administration had already warned about this, with less specificity, in a January 15 report, just days before handing over power to Democrat Joe Biden. A State Department data sheet indicated that the United States government had “reason to believe that several researchers at the institute had become ill before the first outbreak.” [de coronavirus] be identified, with symptoms compatible with Covid-19 and with seasonal illnesses ”. There has been no known progress in determining the ruggedness of this track.

The Chinese laboratory is suspect due to its research with viruses obtained from bats, and the thread of the investigation leads to deaths from pneumonia detected at a mine in Yunnan province, in southwestern China. China. According to NewspaperIn April 2012, six miners fell ill, with symptoms similar to those caused by COVID, after entering the mine to remove bat droppings. Tests indicated they were suffering from pneumonia and by mid-August three of them had died. Experts from the Wuhan Institute of Virology began to investigate and ended up obtaining around a thousand samples at the mine.

The researchers found nine types of coronavirus in these samples. Among them, one known as RaTG13 and which last February, at the start of the pandemic, indicated that it had a 96.2% genetic code similar to SARS-COV-2. It is the closest “relative” found so far to the cause of covid, although still at an enormous evolutionary distance: the two types separated decades ago. Virologist Shi Zhengli, the main expert on this type of virus at WIV, assured that the miners had not fallen ill with covid.

In a report released last Friday in preprinted format in the BioRxiv repository, without review by other experts, scientists at WIV provide details of the coronaviruses found at the mine, stating: “These results suggest that [los coronavirus] that we find in bats is perhaps only the tip of the iceberg ”. However, they argue that the eight that are not RaTG13, almost identical to each other, are only 77% similar to SARS-COv2. They have not shown the ability to infect a human cell using the receptor used by the cause of COVID, according to these researchers. The RaTG13 either.

“Although there is speculation that a leak of RaTG13 from the lab could cause SARS-COV-2, tests in the experiments do not support it,” the report concludes.

But the mistrust is still evident. The WHO mission spent only three hours at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and its members were unable to access more than processed data. Its report concluded on February 9 that the hypothesis of a laboratory accident was “extremely unlikely”, while natural transmission from an animal reservoir was “likely or very likely”. And two days later, on February 11, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that this possibility could not be ruled out and that further investigation was needed.

Este miércoles, a portavoz from WHO respondió a este diario por correo electrónico que la organización se encuentra ahora revisando las recomendaciones del inform sobre el origen del virus at un level técnico, y estos equipos técnicos elaborarán una propuesta para los prólevenos estudios finished. The next investigations would include the hypothesis of the accident of the laboratory, but it is not clear that they will be carried out.

Beijing has always firmly rejected this theory and stands by the conclusions of the WHO report. “The United States continues to promote the theory of a laboratory leak. Are you concerned about traceability or are you just trying to distract? Chinese Foreign Spokesman Zhao Lijian asked on Monday. The Wall Street Journal released its information on the three suspected sick workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. While China has not definitively ruled out, at least in public, the idea of ​​a second mission, it is unlikely to accept it if its goals include a further visit to the Institute of Virology or the other similar installations.

China not only denies the possibility of a leak. He also blames the United States. In the midst of a verbal close with Washington over the causes and management of covid when the pandemic began to reach the United States, Zhao himself – the standard for a new generation of Chinese diplomats known as “war wolves” , much more aggressive in the rhetoric in favor of his country – he fed last year on his Twitter account a conspiracy theory: that the virus had reached Wuhan in October 2019 brought by American soldiers who participated in the military Games organized in this country. city.

Even now, Beijing is also insisting that the United States should allow its own military bioweapons labs at Fort Detrick for an inspection similar to that carried out by WHO experts in Wuhan earlier this year.

The accusations and counter-accusations between Washington and Beijing have accompanied the evolution of the pandemic itself, alongside the spiraling relationship between the two great world powers. And, caught up in the midst of this argument, is the scientific work looking for the origin of the covid.

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