Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19

Humanised animals, usually mice, have had their genomes altered to include a key human gene, in this case the entry receptor for certain SARS-related coronaviruses.

It had come to an electrifying conclusion: the virus causing the pandemic was evolving more slowly than one newly arrived in the human species from another animal normally would. This implied it was already well adapted to human beings from the moment it was first detected in Wuhan in December 2019.

To summarise, an outbreak of mysterious pneumonia in a copper mine, more than 1,800 kilometres by road from Wuhan, led to patient samples being sent to Wuhan for analysis. A 2013 medical thesis concluded, after incorporating results shared by the WIV, that these miners had likely been infected by a SARS-like coronavirus from bats in the mine. An ex... See more

‘A team of scientists finds that unlike SARS, this virus showed very little rapid adaptation/evolution in the early weeks of the epidemic, implying it was already settled into its final form. This implies that the source was almost certainly not via pangolins and probably not the wet market. It was more likely brought to the market by a person not ... See more

‘There is one new paper in particular that has really thrown the issue back into the melting pot,’ he wrote. ‘A team of scientists finds that unlike SARS, this virus showed very little rapid adaptation/evolution in the early weeks of the epidemic, implying it was already settled into its final form.

Facebook flagged as ‘false information’ much of the work of these sleuths, even when it proved to be true information, while Reddit simply deleted it.

If we do not find out how this pandemic began, we are ill-equipped to know when, where and how the next pandemic may start.

The addendum revealed two further startling pieces of information. Not only were the samples from four sick miners tested at the time for viruses, but they were retested after the Covid-19 pandemic began. In other words, the samples from the patients had been stored at the WIV throughout the intervening period, yet had not been shared with independ... See more