There have been rumors in this line from the beginning. At first, it seems little more than the conspiracy theories about crackpots spending too much time on the internet – including border racism targeting China. But as the months passed, the original theory – of the wet market and pangolins – became more dubious. Scientists investigating the origin of SARS-CoV-2 have discovered anomaly after deviation.
As a science writer who has been writing about viruses on and off for 35 years, and a postdoctoral researcher at a top institute, we initially had little doubt that it would be a natural phenomenon. Mother Nature is a better genetic engineer than humans will ever be, and the opportunities for viruses to infect humans are legion, especially where the trade in live wildlife flourishes.
But now we are not so sure. Evidence for a natural flood did not emerge. There is also no evidence of a laboratory accident. But details of the research that a laboratory in Wuhan conducted on closely related viruses and the secrecy surrounding them have become increasingly difficult to refute.
Last month, the U.S. State Department issued an explosive statement under the Trump administration saying it had reason to believe several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in the fall of 2019, ahead of the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms similar to both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses. The institute is China’s leading research center for such diseases and has a database of more than 20,000 pathogen samples from wild animals across the country, mostly bats and rodents. “For more than a year, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has systematically prevented a transparent and thorough investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic and instead chose to devote enormous resources to fraud and disinformation,” he said. he added. A team of investigators from the World Health Organization is currently in Wuhan, but on conditions determined by the government of China.
It is important that the statement did not rule out the possibility that the virus could have escaped from the institute. ‘The virus could of course have originated through human contact with infected animals, which has spread in a pattern similar to a natural epidemic. Alternatively, a laboratory accident may seem like a natural outbreak if the initial exposure involves only a few individuals and exacerbates asymptomatic infection, ‘the statement noted, adding that Chinese researchers have studied coronaviruses in animals under conditions that’ increase the risk of accidental and unconscious exposure. ‘. Where does Covid-19 come from then?
The evidence
In April 2012, six men who cleaned bats in an unused copper mine in Mojiang province in Yunnan, a province in southwest China, fell ill and were hospitalized in Kunming, Yunnan’s capital. Three of the men would die. In June, Dr Zhong Nanshan, the famous physician who discovered in 2003 how patients treated for the first SARS virus – SARS-CoV-1 – were treated. He concluded that a similar virus could be responsible, and recommended identifying the bat species in the mine and testing the patients on SARS.
Doctors eventually concluded that Dr Zhong was right – behind the miners’ illness was a SARS-like coronavirus found in horseshoe bats. Tests were conducted, some by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a thousand kilometers northeast.