Scientists from the United States have put forward a new version of the appearance of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. They speculate that it may have evolved from an infection found in a Chinese miner who contracted it in 2012. Writes about it The telegraph…
As the executive director of the American organization Bioscience Resource Project Jonathan Latham explained, viruses can go through many evolutionary stages in the body of one person.
In 2012, miners in Wuhan developed a pneumonia-like illness after being exposed to bat droppings in a cave. After that, Wuhan scientists found in the same place traces of the RaTG13 bat coronavirus, which is 96 percent similar to COVID-19. According to the theory of American scientists, the unknown virus evolved in the lungs of miners six months before the SARS-CoV-2 form, samples of which were leaked outside the Wuhan laboratory in 2019.
It is noteworthy that this theory was expressed last year. According to her, the site of the emergence of a new coronavirus infection may be the Mojiang Cave in China, since a virus similar to SARS-CoV-2 was discovered there in 2012. Then six men between the ages of 30 and 60 contracted a severe respiratory infection after clearing the caves from the excrement of bats for the subsequent extraction of copper. Three of them subsequently died due to illness.
The survey showed that they were infected with a coronavirus dubbed RaTG13. Virus samples were collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Then Indian researchers suggested that RaTG13 may be a close relative of SARS-CoV-2. However, scientists from France have refuted this point of view.
According to French scientists, people infected with RaTG13 had symptoms very different from those seen in patients with COVID-19. A study of the miners’ medical reports showed that, unlike COVID-19 patients, they coughed up blood and mucus.
Computed tomography showed that the sick men did not have the scars on the lungs, which were observed in many hospitalized with the current coronavirus. Scientists also wondered why the doctors and people with whom the Chinese miners were in close contact did not get sick.
The results of the French study have been questioned by other scientists. Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist at the University of Warwick in the UK, said the theory of laboratory leaks “cannot be ruled out.” At the same time, Professor David Livermore pointed to “some” remarkable “coincidences, as the pandemic began in Wuhan, which is far from the bat caves in southern China, where the Institute of Virology, which conducts molecular work on coronaviruses, is located.
Infectionist, Doctor of Medical Sciences Nikolai Malyshev also called the dubious version that the coronavirus could evolve from an infection discovered in a Chinese miner in 2012.
According to the head of the laboratory for especially dangerous infections of the Federal Research Center for Fundamental and Translational Medicine, professor of virology Alexander Chepurnov, the scientists wanted to test whether the virus could be adapted to a particular species. Thus, a variant appeared that was able to infect a person. “Some of the researchers could have become infected and, without noticing it, took the infection out of the laboratory,” he added.
The Internet magazine Intercept received 900 pages of materials on the topic of American funding for research in China, from which it followed that the United States sponsored the study of coronaviruses and allocated more than three million dollars, including the Institute of Virology in Wuhan.
For example, a grant was issued from the National Institutes of Health in 2014-2019 to investigate the possibility of transmission of the virus from bats to humans. The documents again make one think that the pandemic could have begun as a result of a leak from the laboratory.
At the end of August, American intelligence services completed an investigation into the origin of the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infection. Intelligence has concluded that the coronavirus is not a development of biological weapons. At the same time, it remains unclear exactly how this infection appeared.
The intelligence community has split into two camps over the origin of SARS-CoV-2. The former believe that the virus is zoonotic, that is, passed from non-human animals to humans. According to the second version, the coronavirus is of laboratory origin, while the pandemic began after the infection “broke out” outside the laboratory in Wuhan, China.
The intelligence report also notes that the Chinese authorities were not aware of the coronavirus prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. At the same time, the intelligence believes that Beijing’s actions on this issue “demonstrate China’s uncertainty about the final results of the investigation.”
At the end of March, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a report following a trip to Wuhan, China, in order to find out the origin of the coronavirus. The document said the pandemic was most likely not the result of a laboratory leak.
However, in July, WHO Director-General Tedros Adan Ghebreyesus admitted a version of the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, in which it is assumed to be leaked from the laboratory. He said that the international community prematurely abandoned such a theory of the origin of the virus, and called on the Chinese authorities for greater transparency in the investigation of the issue.