Covid, a biologist from MIT and Harvard: “It was born in the laboratory, not in the Wuhan market”

The covid-19 pandemic “most likely” occurred “because a virus escaped from a research laboratory in Wuhan, China” in what would be “the costliest accident in the history of science” as it was estimated that at least 25 million people have died from the virus worldwide, including over a million in the United States. This is the thesis put forward on the New York Times by Alina Chan, molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard after Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony before the House subcommittee investigating the pandemic. To strengthen his thesis, Chan refers to “a growing volume of evidence” including “gathered from public documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital investigations through online databases, scientific articles analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks of news coming from inside the United States government.”

The scholar indicates five points starting from the fact that the pandemic began in Wuhan, the city where the most important research laboratory in the world for viruses similar to Sars is located and where a team of scientists, led by Shi Zhengli, «was researching of similar viruses for over a decade.”

Secondly, the year before the epidemic – Chan explained – the Wuhan institute, in collaboration with US partners, had proposed creating viruses with the distinctive characteristic of SARS-CoV-2. A “risky” research that led viruses grown from samples of infected animals to be “genetically reconstructed and recombined” becoming “more contagious”. An experiment that the Wuhan laboratory would have carried out in “low biosafety conditions” such that it could not “contain” a virus present in the air as contagious as SARS-CoV-2. According to Chan, the hypothesis that Covid-19 came from an animal from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan “is not supported by concrete evidence” and “the key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from trade is still missing of wild animals” while – concluded the biologist – “in previous coronavirus epidemics, scientists were able to demonstrate the natural origin by collecting multiple pieces of evidence linking infected humans to infected animals”.