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There were rumors to that effect from the start. At first, they seemed little more than conspiracy theories of nutcases spending too much time on the internet – including borderline racism directed at China. But, over the months, this original theory – of the wet market and the pangolins – has become more questionable. Scientists probing the origins of SARS-CoV-2 have discovered an anomaly after an anomaly.
As a science writer who wrote about viruses intermittently for 35 years, and a postdoctoral researcher at a leading institute, we initially had little doubt that this would be a natural occurrence. Mother Nature is a better genetic engineer than humans ever will be, and the opportunities for viruses to infect humans are legion, especially where the wildlife trade is flourishing.
Yet now we are not so sure. There is no evidence for a natural ripple effect. There is also no evidence of a laboratory accident. But details of the research carried out by a Wuhan lab into closely related viruses and the secrecy surrounding it are increasingly difficult to ignore.
Last month, the US State Department, under the Trump administration, released an explosive statement saying it had reason to believe several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in the fall of 2019. , before the first identified case of the epidemic, with symptoms compatible with Covid-19 and common seasonal diseases ”. The institute is China’s leading research center for these diseases and has a database of more than 20,000 pathogen samples from wild animals across the country, mainly bats and rodents. “For more than a year, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has systematically prevented a transparent and thorough investigation into the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic, choosing instead to devote enormous resources to deception and disinformation “, he added. A team of investigators from the World Health Organization is currently in Wuhan, but under conditions set by the Chinese government.
Importantly, the statement does not exclude the possibility that the virus escaped from the institute. “The virus may have emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, spreading in a pattern consistent with a natural epidemic. Alternatively, a lab accident could look like a natural epidemic if the initial exposure included only a few individuals and was made worse by asymptomatic infection, ” the statement noted, adding that Chinese researchers have studied animal coronaviruses under conditions which “ increased the risk of accident and potentially unintentional exposure ”. So where does Covid-19 come from?
The proof
In April 2012, six men who had cleaned up bat droppings in a disused copper mine in Mojiang County, southwest China’s Yunnan province, fell ill and were hospitalized in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. Three of the men would die. In June, Dr. Zhong Nanshan, the famous doctor who discovered in 2003 how to treat patients with the first SARS virus – SARS-CoV-1 – was consulted. He deduced that a similar virus could be responsible and advised to identify species of bats in the mine and to test patients for SARS.
Doctors ultimately deduced that Dr Zhong was right – behind the miners’ illness was a SARS-like coronavirus found in horseshoe bats. Tests have been carried out, some by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), thousands of kilometers to the northeast.
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