The pandemic has already killed more than 160,000 people worldwide and many questions still remain unanswered about the coronavirus that caused it. Pointed to as a possible source of the pandemic, the Wuhan laboratory denied any responsibility this weekend.
- The “zero patient” has still not been identified
- The most likely origin of the epidemic remains the city of Wuhan
- City lab working on coronaviruses denies responsibility
He is conspicuously absent from all the questions and all the ongoing debates on the theories put forward as to the origin of the Covid-19 epidemic which has to date killed more than 160,000 people worldwide: the “patient zero” is still wanted, but still not found. The most widespread hypothesis is that to identify it, it would be necessary to target Wuhan, the Chinese city where the first cases were diagnosed.
But still ? Is he among the customers or visitors of the famous fish market where the coronavirus baptized SARS-CoV-2 would have succeeded in passing from animal to man, coming from the bat and passing on the pangolin, funny anteater scales, before mutating to infect humans? Or is he one of the employees of this laboratory in Wuhan which works on coronaviruses and where he was accidentally infected?
A naturally occurring virus
Very quickly after the start of the epidemic, the Chinese communicated on the characteristics of this new virus, data taken up by several scientific publications including The Lancet. Based on this work, researchers from several countries immediately agreed that SARS-CoV-2 was not a synthetic virus resulting from laboratory work, a position taken up in particular in the Nature magazine.
And the most plausible hypothesis that has been retained is therefore that of the animal origin of the epidemic from the bat, known host of several types of coronavirus, the pangolin being suspected of being the vector at from which contamination to humans was possible.
But for several days, information has targeted the Wuhan laboratory. First there was this article published on April 14 in the Washington Post and taken up in France by the Courrier International magazine stating that the United States Embassy in Beijing had informed the American authorities on several occasions over the past two years of the dangerousness of this laboratory. A dangerousness confirmed on Friday April 18 in Le Point by an American biologist from Rutfled University, Professor Richard H. Ebright, stating that he had evidence “indicating that a project on coronaviruses at the prevention and control center diseases employed safety standards that would pose a high risk of infection to staff.” But this scientist says on the other hand that he does not grant any credibility to the hypothesis of a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2.
An investigation launched by the United States
Because this other track, that of a virus which would not be of natural origin, sometimes mentioned at the start of the crisis but rejected by the scientific data published on this subject, indeed returned to the front of the stage on Thursday April 16. In the daily podcast of Pourquoi Docteur on the health crisis, Professor Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize in Medicine 2008 for the discovery of the AIDS virus, affirmed that day that SARS-CoV-2 had been manipulated in the Wuhan laboratory in part of the search for an AIDS vaccine and that he had accidentally escaped. The Nobel Prize explaining that he had discovered, with one of his collaborators, sequences of HIV in an analysis of the genome of the coronavirus.
“Fake news, conspiracy theory, refusal of the obvious!”, replied in stride, still on Why Doctor, Professor Jean-Paul Stahl, infectious disease specialist at the Grenoble University Hospital, while a CNRS researcher, Monsef Benkirane, explained for 20 Minutes that “sIf we look for short sequences of two or three letters in different genomes, we will necessarily find them, but that does not mean that the two genomes are the same or that one comes from the other”.
A denial from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
Date of the actual start of the epidemic, place and mode of contamination to humans, real impact of the epidemic in China, so many points that are still obscure which lead to an investigation launched by the United States to try to find out. more and to doubts expressed by Emmanuel Macron: “There are obviously things that have happened that we do not know,” said the French president. And Donald Trump this weekend went so far as to threaten China with “consequences” if ongoing investigations show “that the epidemic could have been stopped but was not”.
But the director of the Wuhan laboratory once again denied any responsibility this weekend: “It is impossible that this virus came from us; because we are located in Wuhan people cannot help but do associations…”, said Yuan Zhiming, director of the Institute of Virology, in an interview with the state channel CGTN.
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