There have been rumors in this regard from the very beginning. At first, they seemed a little more than conspiracy theories about crackpots spending too much time on the Internet – including borderline racism against China. But as the months passed, that original theory – of the wet market and the pangolins – became more debatable. Scientists investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2 have discovered anomaly after anomaly.
As a scientific writer who has been writing about viruses for over 35 years and a postdoctoral researcher at a top institute, I initially had little doubt that this would prove to 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 is flourishing.
However, we are not so sure now. There was no evidence of a natural spillover. No evidence for a lab accident. But the details of research conducted by a laboratory in Wuhan on closely related viruses and the secrecy surrounding them have become increasingly difficult to deny.
Last month, the US State Department, under the Trump administration, released an explosive statement saying it had “reason to believe that several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in the fall of 2019, before the first case identified outbreak, with symptoms compatible with both Covid-19 and common seasonal diseases. The institute is China’s largest research center for such diseases and has a database of more than 20,000 samples of pathogens from wildlife 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 origins of the Covid-19 pandemic, instead choosing to devote enormous resources to deception and misinformation,” she added. A team of investigators from the World Health Organization is currently in Wuhan, but under the conditions set by the Chinese government.
Crucially, the statement did 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 compatible with a natural epidemic. Alternatively, a laboratory accident could look like a natural outbreak if the initial exposure included only a few individuals and was aggravated by the asymptomatic infection, “the statement said, adding that Chinese researchers studied animal coronaviruses in conditions that” increased the risk of accident and potentially unwanted exposure ‘. So where did Covid-19 come from?
The evidence
In April 2012, six men who had cleaned bat droppings at a disused copper mine in Mojiang County, Yunnan, a province in southwest China, fell ill and were hospitalized in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. Three of the men would die. In June, he was consulted by Dr. Zhong Nanshan, the famous doctor who, in 2003, learned how to treat patients suffering from the first SARS virus – SARS-CoV-1. He deduced that a similar virus could be responsible and recommended identifying bat species in the mine and testing patients for SARS.
Doctors eventually deduced that Dr. Zhong was right – behind the miners’ disease was a SARS-like coronavirus found in horseshoe bats. The tests were performed, some by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a thousand miles to the northeast.