Pasteur Institute researchers claim to have found coronaviruses near Covid-19 in bats living in Laos.
Two years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the origin of the virus is still unclear. Study of the Pasteur Institute published in the scientific journal nature It revives the animal-to-human transmission path. French researchers have discovered viruses very similar to Covid-19 in bats in Laos.
More specifically, “three viruses have genomic similarities to SARS-CoV-2,” the study authors identified. In particular, they demonstrated the ability of these three coronaviruses to invade human cells, via the link between the Spike protein and the ACE2 receptor, and multiply there.
Questions pending
However, scientists noticed one big difference: the lack of furin fission, which allows Covid-19 to enter human respiratory cells, making the virus highly contagious. According to virologist Mark Elwett who led the study, other “near” viruses may also pose a “risk to human health.”
However, this thesis does not explain how Covid-19 could have arisen in Wuhan in China when the bats studied came from southern China, northern Laos and Vietnam. “This raises the question of how to get it across,” notes Mark Elliott in Columns emphatically.
According to the hypotheses put forward, Covid-19 could have spread quietly between humans before mutating and acquiring the ability to infect, otherwise it would be the first known coronavirus to have acquired this characteristic. This would have enabled him to move from animal to human more easily. More research is underway to determine the origin of Covid-19. If the institute has taken a big step, the debate over the origin of the pandemic has yet to be concluded.
Video – Covid-19: Biden accuses China of withholding information about “origin of the epidemic”
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