As a World health Organization expert mission is about to travel to China to investigate the source of the new crown outbreak, public opinion is deeply skeptical about whether the Chinese side can open up information to the experts. A few days ago, Wuhan Institute of Virus Research expert Shi Zhengli told the BBC that she welcomed any kind of visit as an individual, but said that it was not up to her to decide on the specific options as to whether the experts would be allowed to see her laboratory data and records. At the same time, news broke that a BBC reporter visiting the bat cave in Tongguan Town, Mojiang, Yunnan Province, had to give up after encountering heavy tracking and interception. Why is China still preventing foreign media from approaching the bat cave where Shi Zhengli’s group extracted the virus a year after the outbreak of the new strain?
So, could this bat cave be hiding a major secret? By solving the secret of the bat cave, we might have solved the mystery of the source of New Crown? It also clears the suspicion of whether the New Crown virus originated from nature or a laboratory accident?
A long report published by the French newspaper Le Monde on December 22 and the BBC on December 23 focused on the bat cave in Yunnan, and a BBC reporter was recently prevented from visiting the site. Now, let’s retrace what really happened in this bat cave, precisely what happened in the abandoned copper cave in Tongguan Town, Mojiang, Yunnan 8 years ago? What exactly is the connection between it and the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research, and why do some researchers suspect that this cave may hide the key to cracking the source of the new crown?
The story of what happened more than seven years ago
Tongguan Town, Mojiang County, Yunnan Province, China On April 25, 2012, a 42-year-old man was admitted to Kunming Hospital with a cough that had been going on for two weeks, a high fever and respiratory distress. The next day, three more similar patients aged 32 to 63 were admitted to the hospital. Another 45-year-old man was admitted on the third day, and a week later, a 30-year-old man with the same symptoms was admitted to the same hospital.
All of them had more or less the same symptoms of severe pneumonia. Their chest scans showed bilateral lung damage with frosted glass clouding, which is now recognized as a feature of the 2019 neo-coronavirus. Three of the patients showed signs of thrombosis, a vascular obstruction also typical of the complications of 2019 neo-coronavirus Covid-19.
All six of them worked at an abandoned mine in Tongguan Township, Mojiang County. It was inhabited by bats. The six worked in the mine for up to two weeks, digging in the guano pits where the bats were flying around. Three of them were hospitalized for twelve, forty-eight and one hundred and nine days before dying in the hospital. The two youngest were hospitalized for less than a week before being released, and the other, a 46-year-old man, was hospitalized for four months before being discharged.
The BBC reports that the three deaths are now at the center of a major scientific debate about the origin of the virus and whether it came from nature or a laboratory. The deaths of three workers at the Tong Guan copper mine after being in a cave full of bats sparked suspicions that they had contracted the bat coronavirus. As a result, following the deaths, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology began to sample the bats in the Tongguan mine cave in earnest. Not surprisingly, they visited and detected 293 coronaviruses several times over the next three years. But apart from a brief paper, little information was published about the viruses they collected during these expeditions.
When the Wuhan outbreak broke out in the spring of 2020, stories of the already forgotten Mojiang miners resurfaced on social media. On Twitter, an anonymous account dissected a paper posted on the official Chinese platform used to publish university master’s theses by Li Xu , which detailed the illnesses of the six individuals mentioned above. in March 2014, the journal Science briefly recounted the story and mentioned the discovery of a novel paramyxovirus (MojV) in rats from the same mine, a virus from a virus from a different coronavirus family.
But to date, no precise description of the six clinical cases has been published in the international scientific literature. The similarities between the symptoms of the six miners in Mojang and Covid-19 were of high interest to some scientists when Li Xu’s master’s thesis circulated on social networks in the spring of 2020. Two Indian microbiologists, Monali Rahalkar (Agar Kal Institute) and Rahul Bahulikar (BAIF Research Foundation), analyzed Li Xu’s thesis and wrote a paper that was published in Frontiers in Public Health in October. In the paper, they noted that the Mojiang miners’ disease could provide “important clues about the origin of SARS-CoV-2 (2019 New Coronavirus).
What is the connection between the lung disease of the Mojiang miners in 2012 and Covid-19, which is rampant today, asks Le Monde. Will the time span of almost a decade and the distance of 1,500 km between Wuhan and Tongjiang, Yunnan, give us a clearer picture of the origins of the new coronavirus?
The discovery of neo-coronavirus
Now back to January 23, 2020, researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, published an article on the bioRxiv preprint platform suggesting that the Wuhan novel coronavirus may have originated from bats. The article named the virus, which is genetically closest to SARS-CoV-2, as ” RaTG13″ and published the genome of the virus, which is 96.2% consistent with the sequence leading to the new Covid-19 coronavirus. However, the only information known about the origin of RaTG13 is that it was found in the Yunnan Tongguan bat, the chrysanthemum-headed bat (Rhinolophusaffinis).
The genetic proximity between the two viruses suggests that SARS-CoV-2 is indeed derived from the chrysanthemum-headed bat coronavirus. But under what circumstances was RaTG13 actually extracted? Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research did not definitively answer. According to Etienne Decroly, a viral expert at the CNRS: “Many of us were very surprised by the little information provided by the authors about the origin of this virus, which is crucial for understanding the origin of the epidemic! “. The above paper from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was slightly revised and published by Nature on Feb. 3, does not contain more details about how the virus was sampled and in what environment it was found.
However, a French researcher working with virologists in Wuhan recalled that Shi Zhengli’s team was not the only one in China interested in the Mojiang mine: a laboratory in Beijing had also sent people to Mojiang to collect virus samples.
In July, Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s p4 research lab, tried to dispel doubts in an interview with Science magazine. She confirmed that RaTG13 was RaBtCoV / 4991, extracted from bats in an abandoned Yunnan mine. But the doubts were not completely dispelled.
In an interview with Scientific American, Zhengli Shi explained that the Mojiang miners’ pneumonia was caused by a fungal infection. But this explanation hardly convinced Monali Rahalkar and Rahul Bahulikar, who both wrote, “Li Xu’s master’s thesis concluded that the miners’ pneumonia was caused by a SARS-CoV-type bat virus.”
The two Indian scientists found Li Xu’s conclusion plausible because the thesis authors specifically said that China’s most prominent pulmonologist, Nanshan Zhong, had previously made the same judgment when consulted by medical personnel in Yunnan. What’s more, the two Indian researchers cited a PhD thesis, supervised by Professor Gao Fu, director of the Chinese CDC, and defended in 2016, which briefly reviewed the medical history of the Mojiang miners and clearly stated that all four of them contained neutralizing antibodies (IgG) against SARS-type coronaviruses, in support. However, Shi Zhengli accused that paper to the BBC of “stating statements that do not make sense, and conclusions that are neither based nor logical, and are actually used by conspiracy theorists to question me ……”
Where are the eight unpublished coronaviruses from the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research now
But can it be determined today that the MoJ virus is the source of the new 2019 coronavirus? Meriadeg Le Gouil, a French virus expert, said, “It is not absolutely impossible to infect bats with coronaviruses under these conditions, but the likelihood does not seem high to me. Because these viruses are very fragile and last only a short time in guano. “But doubts remain. The coincidence between the 2012 outbreak of disease in the Mojang miners, the subsequent sampling campaign in the same mine and the discovery of the closest SARS-CoV-2 virus in the same mine in itself warrants further investigation,” the two Indian researchers wrote. They believe that “in the context of the current New Crown pandemic, access to data and a full historical record of this event would be invaluable. “
In a paper published in Nature on November 17, more than nine months after the aforementioned paper was published, the Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers sought to clarify the conditions under which RaTG13 was collected. They wrote that after the Mojiang miner incident, “we suspected a viral infection.” “Between 2012 and 2015, our group sampled from bats in this cave once or twice a year, collecting a total of 1,322 samples. In these samples, we detected 293 diverse coronaviruses, 284 of which were classified as alpha coronaviruses and nine as beta coronaviruses, all of which are associated with SARS-type coronaviruses. One of these nine viruses was named RaTG13 to reflect its source species, the daisy-headed bat (Rhinolophus affinis), city (pass) of collection and year. RaTG13 was fully sequenced in 2018, the researchers said.
The Wuhan P4 research laboratory also collected 13 blood samples from four of the miners between July 2012 and October 2012. According to them, no traces of SARS were found. But this claim contradicts the conclusion of the thesis of the ‘Le Monde’ inquiry, which Professor Gao Fu guided through his PhD defense in 2016. The Wuhan Institute of Virus researchers also said they repeated the analysis of the retained samples in 2020 and came up with the result that there was no SARS-type virus infection.
The problem is that this explanation by the Wuhan Institute of Virus researchers has caused surprise to some of their peers. Etienne Decroly said, “There are eight other unpublished SARS-type coronaviruses collected in the cave that are kept in this virus laboratory.” I’m surprised no one knew they existed! “
This raises a new question, and several scientists questioned by Le Monde are questioning where the unpublished virus sequences retained by the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research are now. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at MIT, said we learned that RaTG13 was sequenced in 2017 and 2018, but those sequences were not released until 2020. Where exactly are these sequences stored during these years? Is it only on the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s own database? “
Disappearing data
In May, an anonymous Twitter account (since deleted) may have provided some answers. The stranger posted links to archived pages describing a database created by researchers at the Wuhan P4 Virus Unit in 2019. The page was an article originally published by the Wuhan virologist on the China Science Data (Csdata.org) website, from which it appears to have been removed. In the article, the Wuhan virologists explain that their database includes samples and data on viral pathogens accumulated by their research group over time, as well as supplementing “authoritative data published internationally.
The authenticity of this short article, which lists 22,257 samples, is beyond doubt: it is confirmed by DOI (Digital Object Identifier), which is a unique identifier for each text published in academic journals. It is produced by the International DOI Foundation (IDF) for distribution as a reference catalog. A check of this catalog indicates that the article-related article (10.11922 / csdata.2019.0018.zh) has indeed been recorded and points to the now-vanished web face of the China Science Data website, where not only has the related article disappeared, but the two web addresses (URLs) indicating the location of the article are also empty. World News contacted the editorial board of the journal but received no response, nor did researchers at the Wuhan Virus Unit.
The Wuhan Virus Institute’s vague representation of the Mojiang miners’ infection, the downlinking of the Institute’s long-accumulated database of viral pathogens without any explanation, the refusal to exchange its researchers’ laboratory notebooks and the Institute’s researchers’ contradictory analysis of the Mojiang miners’ disease have undoubtedly left many scientists with a lot of questions.
Among the scientists interviewed by Le Monde on the origin of the new coronavirus, most believe that “animal activity” is still the most likely hypothesis. Virginie Courtier, a geneticist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), explained that “the virus was probably transmitted to humans well before November 2019 and spread unnoticed in the population, before becoming more virulent after a natural mutation in Wuhan in November 2019. In any case, it seems unlikely that it was synthesized in the laboratory, as no such genetic sequence was found in the databases we have.”
Still, Etienne Decroly said, “we cannot avoid the idea that this pandemic could have been caused by a laboratory accident and must be taken seriously”. “Everything is on the table”, Marion Koopman, a member of WHO’s expert investigation team, vaguely told ‘Nature’ magazine in November.
Previously, there have been many documented cases of laboratory leaks. In 2004, for example, there were two leaks of SARS virus from the CDC’s Institute for the Prevention and Control of Viral Diseases in Beijing, despite the fact that the SARS outbreak had long been contained by then.
Daniel Lucey, a professor of infectious diseases at Georgetown Medical Center in Washington, said in an interview with the BBC that he still believes Sars-Cov-2 is most likely of natural origin, but he does not want to rule out other options so easily. “It’s been more than a dozen months since the first confirmed case of S. neoformans pneumonia emerged, but we haven’t found an animal source,” he said. “So to me, that’s all the more reason to investigate other explanations.” His question is: Is there a virus being studied in Chinese labs that is genetically closer to Sars-Cov-2, and if there ever was, would they inform the outside world? “Not all of the research results will be published.”
In any case, the origin of the new coronavirus can only be truly ascertained with the cooperation of the Chinese side, and in the present circumstances it remains uncertain whether the delegation of international experts will be able to start their investigation in Wuhan without hindrance and whether it is possible to go to the bat cave in the town of Tongguan in Yunnan to map it out.
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