An association of French patients wants to force Olivier Véran to ask the Chinese for “the truth”. Questions relate to the activity of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And very recently, a CNRS virologist estimated that the hypothesis of an accidental release of the new coronavirus from a laboratory could not be ruled out a priori. Almost a year after the start of the pandemic, the origin of SARS-CoV-2 has still not been determined.
- A patient association wants to force the Minister of Health to explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2
- The lawyer for this association questions the activity of the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, China
- On October 20, a CNRS virologist refused to rule out the thesis of the laboratory accident as the possible origin of the new coronavirus.
It has already caused the death of at least 1.2 million people, it disrupts daily life throughout the world, it disrupts the health systems of all countries, it taunts doctors by multiplying the symptoms of infected patients and it has so far held back scientists who try to defeat it through a treatment or a vaccine. But we still do not know today where SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus at the origin of the Covid 19 epidemic, came from.
Faced with this mystery and all the questions it raises, an association of patients, the National Union of Citizen Health Associations (UNACS), seized the Council of State on November 5 to compel the Minister of Health , Olivier Véran, to explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2. “He must ask his Chinese partners for the truth – the country from which the epidemic spread, editor’s note – and answer us”, proclaims the association taken over by the France-Info site.
Behind this procedure, it is the hypothesis, hitherto ruled out almost unanimously by the scientific community, of the “human” origin of the coronavirus which could have accidentally come out of a laboratory which returns to the front of the scene.
This had already been put forward in April 2020 by the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine, Professor Luc Montagnier. According to him, not only did SARS-CoV-2 accidentally come out of a Chinese laboratory, but in addition the analysis of its genome would reveal the presence of sequences from … HIV, the dreaded AIDS virus. Professor Montagnier had expressed himself in this sense in several media, including Why Doctor where we had accompanied his interview with details on our inability to scientifically verify his allegations and by recalling that some of his positions, in particular on vaccines, were legitimately controversial.
“The French don’t know what this virus is, where it comes from and how it works. All of this feeds conspiracy and the minister’s silence is not good in a state of mind like that, c is a silence that I consider as a citizen as inadmissible”, underlines moreover the lawyer of the association who has just seized the Council of State and who, casually, points the finger in his declarations the possible responsibility … of a Chinese laboratory: regarding the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the creation of which France participated in 2004, Me Emmanuel Ludot asks “that we be told how this laboratory is operated”. “The Chinese had the obligation to regularly inform France of the progress of their research and to submit an annual report to the IOM%S, they never did!”, Assures the litigant.
An action that raises questions
This action to clarify the origins of the virus responsible for Covid-19 comes a few days after the publication on October 20, 2020 in the CNRS journal of an interview which, too, revives questions by refusing to dismiss any. “As long as an intermediate virus has not been identified and its genome sequenced, the question of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 will not be resolved”, affirms in this interview Etienne Decroly, virologist, director of research at CNRS and member of the French Society of Virology.
And what does the scientist say about the information we have today about the origin of this coronavirus which, since the last months of 2019, has spread around the world from the Chinese city of Wuhan? He recalls what has been established:
– The genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 is 96% identical to that of a coronavirus collected from a bat in 2013;
– The new coronavirus, on the other hand, is different from the other human coronaviruses (SARS-CoV-1 and MERS) with which it shares only 79% of its genome;
– No human epidemic is due to a direct transmission of virus by a bat, so there is necessarily an “intermediate host”;
– The pangolin, a time presented as responsible for transmission to humans, evolves, according to Etienne Decroly, “in an ecosystem too different from that of the bat to allow recombination of the virus” and moreover the viruses taken from pangolins differ too much from SARS-CoV-2 to explain that the species barrier could have been crossed.
Three possible scenarios
Exit therefore, for the CNRS virologist, the trail of the pangolin as an “intermediate host”. Would this validate that of the laboratory accident? Not necessarily, according to Etienne Decroly who underlines however that “we cannot rule out this hypothesis”. Why ? The CNRS virologist describes three possible scenarios for the transmission of the new coronavirus to humans.
First scenario: it would be a zoonosis, ie a virus from an animal species. But we should in this case, according to Etienne Decroly “have a virus closer to those found in bats or pangolin”.
Second scenario: this new coronavirus would have adapted to humans for a long time, perhaps several years – and would have “circulated quietly until a recent mutation made it more transmissible”. Which would have triggered the epidemic. But for the virologist, it would be necessary, to validate this scenario, “to analyze the viral samples of people who died of pneumonia in the area of emergence before the pandemic”.
Third scenario: SARS-CoV-2 would descend from an animal virus (in particular a virus present in bats) but which “would have adapted to other species during studies on laboratory models” and who escaped accidentally.
“Studying the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is a scientific approach”
So here is the thesis of the laboratory accident revived! Asked about the “conspiratorial” hints of such a statement, Etienne Decroly denies it: “Studying the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is a scientific approach which cannot be assimilated to a conspiracy thesis”, affirms- he also stresses that “today, obtaining a genetic sequence is within the reach of any laboratory” and that “we can build a functional virus from scratch in less than a month from sequences available in databases”.
These remarks are all the more worrying as they complement other information provided by the CNRS virologist in his interview: “In some laboratories, manipulation of the genome of potentially dangerous viruses is a common practice for studying the mechanisms of crossing the barrier. of species”.
And it is this process of crossing the species barrier which we still do not know where and how it took place for the new coronavirus. A “missing link” which, as long as it has not been unmasked, will leave the door open to all possible scientific theses. As with the theories resulting from the most unbridled imaginations.
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