There have been rumors along this line, from the beginning. At first they seemed little more than conspiracy theories of crackpots spending too much time on the Internet, including borderline racism directed at China. But as the months have passed, this original theory – of the wet market and the pangolins – has become more questionable. Scientists investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2 have discovered anomaly after anomaly.
As a scientific writer who has been writing about viruses on and off for 35 years, and a postdoctoral researcher at a top-level institute, we initially had little doubt that this would be a natural phenomenon. Mother Nature is a better genetic engineer than humans will ever be, and the chances of viruses infecting humans are a legion, especially where the wildlife trade flourishes.
Now, we’re not so sure. No evidence of a natural overflow has emerged. There is also no evidence of a laboratory accident. But the details of research done by a Wuhan lab on closely related viruses, and the secrecy surrounding it, are increasingly difficult to accept.
Last month, the U.S. State Department, under the Trump administration, issued an explosive statement saying it had ‘reasons to believe that several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in the fall. of 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses ’. The institute is China’s most important research center on these diseases and has a database of more than 20,000 samples of wildlife pathogens from all over 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, rather than choosing to devote enormous resources to deception and misinformation.” added. A team of World Health Organization researchers is currently in Wuhan, but on terms set by the Chinese government.
Crucially, the statement does not rule out the possibility that the virus escaped from the institute. “The virus could have arisen naturally from human contact with infected animals, spreading in a pattern consistent with a natural epidemic. On the other hand, a laboratory accident could look like a natural outbreak if the initial exposure only included a few individuals and was exacerbated by an asymptomatic infection, “the statement said, adding that Chinese researchers have studied animal coronaviruses under conditions that ‘increased the risk of involuntary exposure.’ came out Covid-19?
The evidence
In April 2012, six men who had been cleaning bat droppings at a disused copper mine in Mojiang County, Yunnan, a southwestern province of China, fell ill and were hospitalized in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. Three of the men would die. In June, he consulted Dr. Zhong Nanshan, the famous doctor who in 2003 discovered how to treat patients suffering from the first SARS virus (SARS-CoV-1). He inferred that a similar virus could be responsible and advised identifying bat species in the mine and testing SARS on patients.
Doctors finally deduced that Dr. Zhong had been right: behind the miners ’disease was a SARS-like coronavirus found in horseshoe bats. The tests were conducted, some by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a thousand kilometers to the northeast.