By Saarani Vengadesen
There has been a longstanding cold war between USA and China, with the USA accusing the latter of creating the infamous SARS-CoV2 virus in the lab. The latest probe concluded by WHO states that coronavirus originated from animal and it is not leaked from the lab. WHO team revealed the preliminary finding during Wuhan Press Conference on 9 Feb after wrapping up their fieldwork in Wuhan, China.
The virus that causes Covid-19 most likely jumped from one species to another before entering the human population and is highly unlikely to have leaked from a laboratory, a leader of a World Health Organization investigative team said at the press conference.
[ihc-hide-content ihc_mb_type=”block” ihc_mb_who=”unreg” ihc_mb_template=”3″ ]This result was announced after reviewing environmental samples from the Wuhan’s Huanan Market, as well as thousands of biological samples and case files from more than 200 hospitals, 17 Chinese and 17 WHO experts said that the market only places where the virus began to spread rapidly but is impossible to say how the virus arrived there reported The Wall Street Journal.
“The issue in my mind is the virus infects people so well it had to somehow evolve before it even reached the Wuhan seafood market”, said Dr Stanley Pearlman who has been studying coronaviruses for decades.
Dr Ben Embark from WHO laid out a possibility that virus could take a long path and evolved during movement across borders before arriving in the Huanan Market. He addressed that the market sold frozen farm products and called for further research on similar products still being sold in other places.
This speculation is not new and it is ongoing since the pandemic started. A team of scientists from US, UK and Australia has already researched the origin of coronavirus in March 2020, during the early stage of the pandemic and published a research paper in Nature Medicine, in March 2020. They have also concluded that the Coronavirus is from the wild and is not lab-based on a few strong scientific findings.
Scientists did a comparison among the cleavage sites of SARS-CoV2, HKU1, SARS-CoV, pangolin and bats. It was reported that there is a wide genetic variation in the spike suggesting it is likely that the same virus or similar strains will be discovered in other species.
“Before getting indulged in conspiracy theories a fact that everyone should be mindful of is genetic manipulation cannot be done from scratch. Scientists still need to start from the existing organism, in this case, a virus. This would involve synthesising a gene based on the trait the scientists want. But when scientists studied the genetic data of SARS-CoV-2, they found that this novel virus is not derived from any previously known virus backbone. SARS-CoV-2 has components that differ from known viruses, so they had to come from an unknown virus or viruses in nature”, reported in The Petri Dish based on the findings of Nature Medicine research paper.
Thus, the WHO’s conclusion “completely refutes the conspiracy theory raised by some anti-China hawks, like former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, who has been accusing the Wuhan Institute of Virology of leaking the virus,” the Global Times wrote.
Moving forward, WHO officials said they are keen to see if early Coronaviruses cases occurred outside of China before the Wuhan outbreak. Peter Daszak, another member of WHO team told reporters after the press conference that, “I think our focus needs to shift to those supply chains to the market, supply chains from outside China, even”.
“We should really go and search for evidence of earlier circulation wherever that is indicated”, Dutch Marion Koopmans, a Dutch virologist told The Wall Street Journal. She said studies suggested there may have been cases in Italy in late November. It is hoped the current WHO report puts all the conspiracy theory to a stop and battle the pandemic in a scientific manner rather than creating controversy.[/ihc-hide-content]
