The WHO will no longer be seriously considering the possibility of a laboratory accident playing a role in the outbreak of coronavirus.
The World Health Organization will no longer be seriously considering the possibility of a laboratory accident playing a role in the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2:
“Our initial findings suggest that the introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway and one that will require more studies and more specific targeted research,” WHO food safety and animal diseases expert Peter Ben Embarek said at a news conference Tuesday.
This virus could well have jumped to humans from an intermediary host species. But we haven’t found this precise virus in any pangolins yet — or for that matter, in any bats. Nor have we found evidence that pangolins or bats were for sale at the Huanan Seafood Market.
To the extent we can trust the assessment of Chinese health authorities, Gao Fu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said in May that “testing of samples from a Wuhan food market, initially suspected as a path for the virus’s spread to humans, failed to show links between animals being sold there and the pathogen.”
The WHO’s current hypothesis appears to be that the SARS-CoV-2 virus jumped from a bat to some pangolin, cultivated in the pangolin, jumped to humans, and then left no trace in any other animals. All of this occurred, coincidentally, a very short distance away from not one but two laboratories researching coronaviruses in bats, with absolutely no connection to either of those labs whatsoever.
The virus that is most similar to SARS-CoV-2 that has been found naturally occurring in an animal is in horseshoe bats in Mojiang, Yunnan, China, which is 967 miles from the city of Wuhan. The horseshoe bat does not migrate to Wuhan.
Back in 2012, a severe pneumonia-like illness killed three miners who were working in a mineshaft in Mojiang.
It was found that RaTG13/CoV4991 was collected from Tongguan mineshaft in Mojiang, Yunnan, China, in 2013. Surprisingly, the same mineshaft was also associated with a severe pneumonia-like illness in miners in 2012 killing three of the six miners. A Master’s thesis (in the Chinese language) was found on the cnki.net website which described in detail the severe illness in miners. The thesis concluded that a SARS-like CoV originating from Chinese horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus) was the predicted causative agent. The cases were remotely monitored by a prominent pulmonologist in China. Retrospective analysis of the pneumonia cases shows striking similarities with COVID-19. Bilateral pneumonia, vascular complications like pulmonary thromboembolism, and secondary infections are the main similarities.
A particularly eye-opening detail in that research paper about the miners is that blood samples from those infected miners were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology:
Dr. Nanshan’s diagnosis for patients 3 and 4 were interstitial pneumonia (primarily of viral origin), with a possibility of secondary infection (invasive pulmonary aspergillosis). He requested swab testing and SARS antibody testing (to be carried in WIV). He also asked the hospital staff to confirm with the Kunming Institute of Zoology for the type of bat. The radiological findings were diffuse ground-glass opacities and areas of peripheral consolidation. The thesis concluded that the pneumonia cases were due to viral pneumonia, primarily from SARS-like coronaviruses originating from horseshoe bats. The percentage of lymphocytes, T, B, and NK cells decreased significantly after the admission of the patients, which indicated that the immune system of the patients was seriously damaged by a viral infection. Later, after the consultation of Dr. Zhong Nanshan, (~after June 19, 2012), blood samples were sent to WIV for antibody testing.
We know that blood samples, containing the naturally-occurring virus that is most similar to SARS-CoV-2, were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2012. We know that U.S. officials visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2018 and warned in a memo about a “shortage of the highly trained technicians and investigators required to safely operate a [Biosafety Level] 4 laboratory.” And then there was this comment from China’s “Bat Woman” virologist, Shi Zhengli:
Shi, a virologist who is often called China’s “bat woman” by her colleagues because of her virus-hunting expeditions in bat caves over the past 16 years, walked out of the conference she was attending in Shanghai and hopped on the next train back to Wuhan. “I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she says. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.” Her studies had shown that the southern, subtropical provinces of Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan have the greatest risk of coronaviruses jumping to humans from animals—particularly bats, a known reservoir. If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, “Could they have come from our lab?”
If the scientists who were working with bat viruses had first feared a laboratory accident themselves, why is this scenario so unthinkable for anyone else?
As the Associated Press noted December 30, “the Chinese government is strictly controlling all research into its origins, clamping down on some while actively promoting fringe theories that it could have come from outside China.”