Like the virus it claims to explain the origin of, the following conjecture refuses to die: the new coronavirus was prepared in a Chinese laboratory and either escaped or was intentionally released. publicly available evidence. This implies that impetuous members of a vast malignant network have agreed to conceive of the COVID-19 pandemic or to cover an accident which caused it. History has all the characteristics of a conspiracy theory. And it has won the support of the highest levels of the U.S. government, but solid, widely available evidence supports a very different assumption about the origins of the virus: it evolved naturally.
Laboratory releases of dangerous viruses are not unknown. In 2003, for example, the virus causing SARS made a graduate student sick who worked in a Singapore laboratory a few months after the epidemic ended. But there is no evidence that a similar breach has triggered the current pandemic.
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Scientists believe that the direct ancestor of the coronavirus now known as SARS-CoV-2 has lived in bats and other animals for so long that it is no longer able to make them sick. At some point in late 2019, the genetic code of the virus underwent a mutation that allowed it to move from its animal “reservoir” to its first human host.
By the time this jump was made, the virus had recently developed – or would soon develop – the ability to spread easily from person to person. The result is a global pandemic that has sickened at least 3.9 million people and caused more than 274,000 deaths. Scientists cite several layers of evidence to support their hypotheses. While they recognize the shortcomings in which further research would strengthen their position or change their reading of the exact path the virus takes, they are firm on the final destination of the evidence. Here’s how a team of biologists, researchers and infectious diseases and biosecurity experts explained it. a report published in the journal Nature Medicine: “We don’t think any type of laboratory scenario is plausible.”
To reach this conclusion, the authors drew on research that compared the genetic signatures of three sets of viral samples. The first are from Chinese patients who fell ill last year as a result of unexplained pneumonia; the second came from bats living near Wuhan, China, which were sometimes brought to an open-air market for sale; and the third was from pangolins, Malaysian mongoose-like animals known to have been illegally imported into China. The analysis revealed a direct family relationship between the three. Bats were probably the source of the coronavirus that appeared in Wuhan patients, but the virus had to undergo certain key genetic changes to infect humans. Mysteriously, many of the necessary changes have been found in viruses farthest from pangolins. With improbable luck, a coronavirus could take the mutations necessary to infect humans while being grown in a laboratory, the researchers conceded. More likely, nature just made this jump once in the pangolin, and somewhere in the great diversity of unsampled bat species, it seems to have done it again. At the same time, other researchers who have screened the genetic sequences of dozens of preserved viral samples have discovered that the new coronavirus is a distant cousin of the coronavirus that caused the SARS epidemic of 2002 and 2003, and the coronavirus that gave rise to MERS in 2009. The virus responsible for COVID-19 has distinctive characteristics that separate it from its predecessors by very many generations, according to their report in the Journal of Virology.
But none of the genetic mutations looked like those that a genius scientist would have designed in a laboratory to modify a virus for better performance, the researchers wrote. Instead, they have all the characteristics of the gradual increase in changes that occur over time when a virus encounters new environments and the immune systems of new organisms. In other words, SARS-CoV-2 looks like a virus that has evolved, the team Other researchers have examined the nearly 30,000 letter pairs of RNA in the virus genome and have located the junction where a mutation has most likely changed its anatomical features. The authors of the analysis in Nature Microbiology proposed plausible natural circumstances to explain how this would have happened. For example, they cited research showing that when chickens were repeatedly exposed to a harmless swan virus, the virus developed mutations that made it capable of killing every infected chicken.
They cited laboratory experiments to show how the changing form of the virus would have allowed the body to cling, infect and divert human cells, and they detected biological strategies that the virus had adopted that allowed it to spread from host to host – but barely. The mechanism was much more like the type of hacking that would naturally evolve in a coronavirus, not the optimal solution that a genetic engineer would choose. And finally, they looked for telltale signs of genetic forgery that would have been left behind by a manipulation objective in a laboratory. These so-called reverse genetic systems are used in the manufacture of vaccines and treatments for coronaviruses, and have been described in detail in scientific reports. None are present in SARS-CoV-2, the investigators found.
All of this scientific work has been in the public domain since mid-March, but in recent days President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have breathed new life into the claim that the new coronavirus is the product of ‘a state virology. At the White House last week, a reporter asked Trump if he had “seen anything” that gave him “a high degree of confidence that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source of this virus.” “Yes I have . Yes, I did, ”said the president, without giving further details. He then added, “and I think the World Health Organization should be ashamed of itself because it is like the PR agency for China.”
When asked later that day to clarify what he had learned about the origins of the virus, he replied, “I can’t tell you. I am not allowed to tell you. “Pompeo went further, telling ABC News on Sunday” there is significant evidence that it comes from the laboratory “in Wuhan. He gave no details, but added that he could not say whether the release was intentional because “the Chinese Communist Party refused to cooperate with world health experts.” These allegations were met almost immediately with scientific turmoil. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases , qualified the claim that the coronavirus came from a laboratory “as a circular argument”.
“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what exists now,” there is a strong scientific argument that “it could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated,” Fauci said in an interview with National Geographic. “Everything about progressive evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in the wild, then jumped species. “The office of the director of national intelligence had previously issued a statement to the same effect:” The intelligence community also agrees with the broad scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was neither of human origin nor genetically amended.”
The representative of the World Health Organization in China also spoke.
“All the evidence available to date suggests that the virus is of natural animal origin and is not a manipulated or engineered virus,” said Dr. Gauden Galea in an interview published by WHO. “Many researchers have been able to examine the genomic characteristics of the virus and have found that the evidence does not prove that it is a laboratory construct.” However, Galea also said that the World Health Agency has not been allowed access to laboratory journals from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Center for Disease Control and Prevention of China. China is an authoritarian state which competes with the United States in the military, commercial and diplomatic fields, and relations between the two countries have become particularly trying since the coming to power of Trump. As early as January, after China reported an epidemic of an unknown virus in Wuhan, the United States offered to send a team of epidemiologists to help investigate and contain the epidemic. China declined the offer and continued to keep the United States at bay.
In mid-February, China hosted a joint expert mission on COVID-19 organized by WHO. Dr. Clifford Lane, a key lieutenant from Fauci, traveled with the mission. “It was very clear that Chinese scientists were focusing on finding the reservoir,” which was behind the new coronavirus, said Lane this week. They’re also looking for the pandemic zero patient, because they know that the closer they get to finding the first infected human, the closer they get to identifying the source. “They don’t want this to happen. even more than us, “he said. Harvard microbiologist William Hanage said the facts don’t support the idea that a botched scientist or mad genius attempted to transform an existing coronavirus into a biological weapon.
“There is no way a person studying this in a laboratory can identify the properties that made it a pandemic,” he said. No scientist can scrutinize the genes of a virus and locate the features that made it so devilishly effective in traveling the world, he said. With a pandemic “knocking on our door”, there is nothing to gain by talking about the origins of the virus right now, added Hanage. Whatever is said “inadvertently feeds conspiracy theories” or “twists on a political point, and that is useless,” he said. His advice: “Focus on the raging pandemic and leave it for later.”
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