The WHO mission concluded its trip to China last month with the preliminary conclusion that it was “highly unlikely” that the virus had leaked from a laboratory, and while it later said it would continue to examine all hypotheses, it still gave the highest priority to research that the virus had evolved naturally. At the same Time, independent scientists have raised another voice, arguing that Beijing and the WHO will never find evidence that the new coronavirus evolved naturally “because it leaked out of a laboratory”; scientists have called for an independent and transparent investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research to be timely.
“All assumptions will be subject to periodic review.” Peter Ben Embarek, head of WHO’s Wuhan investigation mission, recently said something slightly different than in Beijing.
Embarek said the hypotheses include that the new coronavirus was transmitted from an animal intermediate host to humans, that it was transmitted directly by bats, that it was transmitted from frozen wildlife from Southeast Asia into the Wuhan market, known as the “cold chain,” and that four hypotheses were leaked from the Wuhan virus laboratory.
WHO still insists lab leak is “highly unlikely”
But WHO still insists that the laboratory leak is “highly unlikely” position. “Based on the data we have, we believe that the hypothesis of a laboratory accident has a low priority (less priority) and is therefore classified as extremely unlikely.” Embarek said.
Michael Ryan, executive director of WHO’s health emergencies program, believes the mission of the WHO viral source investigation mission is misunderstood. He clarified that the operation “is a collaborative effort between WHO and the Chinese government, in accordance with WHO resolutions,” and “is not some investigation into possible errors or investigative powers that WHO might have that don’t really exist.”
After the 2003-2004 Sars (SARS) pandemic outbreak in China’s Guangdong province, scientists first traced the animal intermediate host, the civet, and then the source, the bat. This new coronavirus pandemic was different in that the scientific community knew the source of the virus was bats, but did not know how it was the bats’ virus that spread to human society.
WHO Wuhan Inquiry member Dominic Dwyer of Australia (Dominic Dwyer) on February 22 in the British newspaper The Guardian pointed out in an article, “Our investigation concluded that the virus most likely originated in animals and may have been transmitted from bats to humans, lending an intermediate host that we do not yet know, in an unknown location. ” DeWell said similar “zoonotic” diseases have caused pandemics in the past. “But we’re still trying to identify exactly what event led to today’s pandemic,” he said.
Pangolin playing natural evolutionary host to virus?
A paper published in Nature Medicine in March 2020 by Anderson and six other scientists concluded that the new coronavirus could not have arisen from laboratory manipulation of similar coronaviruses, but rather from natural selection in animal hosts prior to zoonosis and natural selection in humans after zoonosis. In short, it is a product of natural evolution.
The paper stated that “the Malayan pangolin (Manis javanica) illegally imported into Guangdong Province contains a coronavirus similar to SARS-CoV-2 (i.e., neocoronavirus)” and is a possible animal intermediate host.
A year later, similar arguments continue to emerge, with Tuesday’s (March 2) Wall Street Journal reporting that at least four recent studies have identified coronaviruses closely related to the New Coronavirus strain in bats and pangolins in Southeast Asia and Japan, suggesting that these pathogens are more widespread than previously known and that the virus has ample opportunity to evolve.
But the biggest problem with the pangolin-as-animal-intermediate host hypothesis is that there is no evidence of how marketed pangolins led to human infection with the new coronaviruses, and “we don’t have all those links in the chain.” Jonathan Latham, a virologist, told Voice of America.
Latham is the founder of the Bioscience Resource Project, a New York-based science nonprofit, and editor-in-chief of the Independent Science News website.
All the evidence points to Wuhan Virus Institute?
He believes that China and the World Health Organization will never find evidence of the natural origin of the COVID-19 pandemic virus, “which simply means that all the evidence that is known points to the virus coming from the Wuhan lab,” he told VOA.
If you exclude the “difficult to quantify and virtually unknown local factor” of Wuhan being a major hub for bat virus research and coronavirus research, he said, the odds of Wuhaners becoming pandemic patient number zero are the same as everyone else in the world: 1 in 630, or 7 billion divided by 11 million. If the new coronavirus evolved naturally, the odds of it triggering a pandemic from the 28 known coronavirus species are 1 in 28. If you add the two together, the odds of Wuhan being the site of a naturally evolved neo-coronavirus pandemic outbreak are 1 in 630 times 28, or 1 in 17,640.
Latham said it is very common for viruses to leak from laboratories, and the likelihood of a new coronavirus leak is even higher. “The fact that this virus is airborne and doesn’t show serious symptoms means that people are infected without even knowing it and may never know it, and this research facility may never know it’s infected by the virus, which makes people who study lab leaks very wary, and they have flagged this as the highest likelihood of causing a lab leak. “
Latham identified the source of the pandemic as a virus leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research, stemming from research on a Chinese doctor’s master’s thesis. “It contained evidence that led us to rethink everything we thought was known about the new coronavirus pandemic,” He said.
2012: Yunnan mine bat coronavirus causes 6 illnesses, 3 deaths
In April 2012, a small outbreak of disease occurred at a mine in Mojiang, Yunnan province. six miners were infected with a mysterious coronavirus 14 days after removing bat guano from the mine, and three of them eventually died.
Dr. Li Xu, who treated the miners, later described in his paper “Analysis of Six Patients with Severe Pneumonia Caused by an Unknown Virus” that the six miners had the basic symptoms of those now infected with the new coronavirus: dry cough, coughing sputum, high fever, aching limbs, some with breathing difficulties and headaches.
They were treated with ventilators, as well as steroids, blood-thinning and antiviral drugs. Believing that they might have triggered an Epidemic, Li Xu held a teleconference with university experts, including “Sars hero” Dr. Zhong Nanshan.
The teleconference with Zhong Nanshan was important,” Latham said, noting that test samples from the sick miners were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research and Zhong Nanshan. “It showed that the illness of the six miners was of high concern. Second, a SARS-like coronavirus was considered a possible cause of their illness.”
Latham said Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research traveled to the Mojiang mine in Yunnan, 1,000 kilometers away from Wuhan, from August 2012 to July 2013 to collect the bat virus on four different occasions. “Their collection trips even started when these miners were still hospitalized,” Latham added.
Shi Zhengli has the most similar virus sequences
From a letter they obtained, Latham said, Zhengli Shi confirmed to the Virology Database that the BtGoV/4991 and RaTG13 she collected came from the same batch of bat guano samples from the same mine. These two strains are the most closely related sequences to the new coronavirus, with 98.7 and 96.2 percent similarity, respectively .
According to Latham, “RaTG13 later evolved into neo-coronavirus in the sick miners. And this virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research in 2019.”
Latham named this hypothesis for the origin of the new coronavirus the “Mojiang Miners Passage” (MMP).
According to this hypothesis, Latham said, “the new coronavirus is not a synthetic virus; but, again, if it had not been brought to Wuhan and no further molecular studies or programs had been conducted on it, then the virus would have been extinct by natural causes and would not have escaped to cause a new coronavirus pandemic.”
According to Latham, “the most important questions about the origin of the new coronavirus can be resolved by simply examining the complete laboratory notebooks and biosafety records of the researchers involved at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research.”
Latest research by German scientists
Released Feb. 18, a study of the new coronavirus by nanoscientist Prof. Roland Wiesendanger of the University of Hamburg in Germany found that “the current pandemic originated from a laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research in China.”
In a press statement, the University of Hamburg said, “There are many direct indications that the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pathogen came from a laboratory, and refers to a young researcher at the Wuhan Institute for Virus Research as the first person to be infected.”
The study says, “Her name is Huang Yanling and she was born on Oct. 20, 1988. She has been a staff member of the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research since 2012 and has published at least six scientific papers on the institute’s Web site. Since late 2019, she has disappeared, and her photo and profile have been removed from the institute’s website (as well as her personal website).”
The 104-page study concluded that a research team led by Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research not only collected naturally occurring coronaviruses, but also manipulated them to make them more infectious and dangerous to humans. The so-called “functionally acquired” study was published in a relevant professional journal.
The study reported serious security flaws at the Wuhan Virus Institute. Two years before the pandemic broke out, officials from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing visited a Chinese research facility in Wuhan several times and issued two formal warnings to Washington about inadequate security measures at the laboratory, which posed new SARS-like risks in studying bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission.
A Chinese CCTV documentary about Shi Zhengli’s lab collecting bat virus samples in Yunnan, which aired in December 2017, said that “the risk of bat bites remains despite wearing gloves.” A researcher in the film said that “you can bite your hand through the gloves, just like sticking a needle in it.”
The study reveals that China has tried to cover up the truth from the beginning of the outbreak. It faked the number of infections and deaths. Tencent had inadvertently released the real numbers in its “Real-Time Tracking of the Epidemic,” which at 23:39 on Feb. 1 read 154,023 confirmed cases and 24,589 deaths nationwide; but at 16:00 on Feb. 2, the numbers became 14,446 confirmed cases and 304 deaths nationwide.
The report said that one of the reasons for the discrepancy between the number of unofficial and official diagnoses of infections and deaths in China at the beginning of the pandemic may be due to the strange definition of “official new cases”. Caixin reported on Feb. 5 that experts from the National Health Commission stipulated that a positive diagnosis must meet three conditions: a history of exposure to the South China seafood market, fever symptoms and full gene sequencing, all three of which must be met to confirm the diagnosis. “The third one, in particular, is so demanding that very few people actually get to have their genome sequenced,” the report said.
Latham: Lab escape hypothesis should not be dismissed as “conspiracy theory”
Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on May 3, 2020, that there was “overwhelming evidence” that the new coronavirus came from a laboratory in China. On Feb. 23, Pompeo and his former China Policy adviser Yu Maochun jointly published an article in the Wall Street Journal, “China’s Negligence Costs the World: Beijing Is Obsessed with Viruses, but Doesn’t Care About Biosecurity.
In an interview with the Voice of America, Yu said that after the 2003 SARS pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party‘s “drive to make great leaps forward came back,” and that “China has more than 250 state key laboratories in eight major disciplines, with biochemical laboratories accounting for 40 percent of them. “.
“Chinese scientists have discovered nearly 2,000 new viruses in a little more than 10 years. And it took the world 200 years to reach that many.” He said, citing data from the Chinese Association for Science and Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Yu Maochun said there are hidden problems with security and management validation at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research. “Touted by the official media as the virus institute with the highest biosafety level, it is authorized to study highly toxic and most dangerous viruses and pathogens. But the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research actually failed to be rated in the top 20 ‘excellent category of laboratories’.
“Now that a reliable and testable laboratory escape hypothesis is available, this task may become much easier.” Says Latham, founder of the Bioscience Resources Program. “It is therefore an appropriate time to renew the call for an independent and transparent investigation of the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research.”
He said the scientific establishment has labeled the hypothesis that the virus escaped from the lab as “rumors,” “unproven theories” and “conspiracy theories. By taking this position, the scientific establishment has sent a clear message that scientists who take the possibility of lab escape seriously are putting their careers at risk.”
Latham called on journalists to investigate some of these conflicts of interest “that have prevented scientists and research institutions from properly investigating the hypothesis of laboratory virus escape.”
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