Well ….good news…. Facebook has said that it will no longer ban posts claiming that Covid was man made amid calls for China to investigate that the virus escaped from the Virology lab at Wuhan.
Is it plausible that a natural virus had emerged from the very same place that has an Institute of Virology researching bat diseases? In a letter to the journal ‘Science’ eighteen of the worlds epidemiologists from Cambridge, Harvard and Stanford have called for an independent enquiry .
They believe that a simple solution is that the virus escaped from the lab rather than the virus jumping from a bat to a human . Zoonosis is bat jumping to humans . The virus has been found to have well adapted to infect humans . The Daily Telegraph has reported that scientists were researching this in 2008 but only to pre-empt what could be a future deadly virus . Look at this ….
2008- Wuhan labs can switch receptor binding domains for bat and human SARS virus.
2010- Wuhan labs started experiments to increase the infectiousness of SARS corona virus in humans
2012/13- a WIV researcher found the bat virus from a disused mine shaft in Yunnan near Laos and a man clearing out bat guano from the cave developed a respiratory illness and died. The Guardian newspaper tells us that researchers in caves in northern Laos have discovered coronaviruses that are closely related and are more easily attached to the early strains of SARS Covid 2 suggesting that bat to human transition is possible.
2015 – Wuhan labs had created a highly chimeric virus targeting the human respiratory tract
2015 – Experiments found that sweet and bitter taste receptors could account for why people lose their sense of taste with COVID
2018 & 2019 – Wuhan applied for grants from the US National Institute of Allergy and Virology and Infectious Diseases to work on ‘virus infection experiments in humanised mice’. A Dr Danzak warned in 2019 that Wuhan had created an untreatable SARS virus that could infect humanised mice .
But- to put another shine on the story a Dr Stoye of the Francis Crick Institute in London believes that the fast evolution of the virus makes it unlikely to be man made. And there is no absolute proof that the virus was engineered by man. We have seen over the last two years the virus has genetically evolved from the original Alpha strain to the current Omicrom one Every year our flu jab is different from the one we had the year before – the virus has mutated . The virus is a living thing and has to mutate to survive.
But – in 2004 a SARS virus escaped from a lab in Beijing three times . In 2019 three researchers fell ill in Wuhan and were hospitalised and again in 2019 there was an emergency shutdown at Wuhan
The infection of a seafood vendor with COVID symptoms in December 2019 in the seafood market at Wuhan was investigated but the Chinese conclusion was that the markets was not the site of a ‘superspreader ‘. The market may be the site of an event but was not the source of a case of an animal host carrying the virus Despite testing 80,000 plus animals in China between 2017 and 2021 China is not stamping out the wildlife trade so they probably think that the market was not responsible.
How do we prevent another outbreak? Did it begin with products used in traditional Chinese medicine? A naturally evolving virus from animals . Did it begin with faulty lab research at he worlds most active research programme for SARS /COVID which is at Wuhan. Does it matter ?
Yes. It matters. If we find out the source we can collectively work to eliminate the source. The world has woken up to the fact beside a nuclear bomb there is another world catastrophe waiting to happen. A product that is much cheaper and more easily available if engineered by scientists capable of decimating the worlds population on a more global scale than one nuclear bomb. The worst scenario is of a man made product spread by man. All it needs is a rogue scientist; a rogue state.
Or…. Was it a virus naturally evolving because of pressure on bats or pangolins due to human encroachment of their habitats or from climate change, and combined with the trade in wild animals making the pandemic virus more likely. A virus that has to change to survive.
Is it possible that this world wide event could lead to more co-operation between nations and amalgamate all research. To work together to prevent or reduce events like this pandemic. We are living through historic times . World War 2 resulted in approximately 73 million worldwide deaths for various reasons , so far Covid has killed over 5 million and it isn’t finished yet.
Read ‘ Viral’ by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley. Kindle edition £11.99
The UKs Human story of Covid by Rachel Clarke. £16.99
The Plague Year America in the Time of Covid. By Laurence Wright. £20
Vaxxers The inside story of the Oxford Astraveneca Vaccine and the race against the virus. By Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green £20
The facts for this article has been from numerous newspapers articles from The Telegraph and The Times
