Why Is Everyone Suddenly Talking About Escaping COVID-19 From the Lab?
There is a fairly broad consensus among scientists studying viruses that the one causing COVID-19 originated naturally and spread from animals to humans sometime in late 2019 in or near Wuhan, China. But the alternative hypothesis that he escaped from a laboratory in this city has spread like a political soccer ball since the start of the pandemic and has never been viewed with more gullibility than in recent days.
Is there any new evidence that a laboratory leak could have occurred? Not really; from a scientific point of view, nothing has changed that could change the opinion of experts. But scientists and governments have so far been unable to pinpoint the exact source of the coronavirus, despite nearly a year and a half of research. So this is technically still an open question.
What brought this leak theory back from the Wuhan lab to the news?
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that three researchers from the Wuhan lab were hospitalized in November 2019 (the virus was officially discovered in December). Their symptoms matched those of COVID-19, but they also matched “seasonal illness” – in other words, they could have just had a cold or flu.
This new information is hardly a smoking gun, but it came as the World Health Organization was preparing the next round of investigations into the origins of the virus.
President Biden then announced that he had requested a report from the intelligence community 90 days later on what is known about the possible origins of the coronavirus. It is unlikely that in the next 90 days they will learn something that they have not learned in the last year and a half, but the problem has always been political and it does. Democrats and GOP argue over this; The US and China threaten to investigate each other .
Could a virus have been created in a laboratory and used as a biological weapon?
According to experts, such a scenario is extremely unlikely. Genetic analysis showed that it is very similar to another coronavirus that existed in the wild, in bats, in another area of China. There are no signs of laboratory alterations on it; You can learn more about this theory from a geneticist here .
There’s also a plausibility issue here: the whole idea of biological weapons – any weapon – is that you should be able to use it against an enemy without killing you at the same time. Cannons shoot from a distance; bombs are placed or dropped strategically. A highly contagious virus will be a bad weapon as there are no boundaries to limit it to its intended victims only. And the coronavirus has indeed spread across the world.
Well, if the virus was not created in a laboratory, could it have been detected naturally and then escaped?
This is much more plausible than the idea that the virus was created or deliberately released, but very few experts think it is likely. It’s worth a look, though, as it’s not entirely impossible.
Part of the work in the Wuhan lab has been researching a variety of coronaviruses, including many from bats, to determine what makes some of them so dangerous. (Remember, SARS was another coronavirus that may have originated from bats and caused a frightening but short-lived pandemic that began in Asia in 2003.)
Some of the information about SARS, other coronaviruses, and what is currently known about the possible natural origins of the virus that causes COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2 as it is officially known) is well explained by this rundown from Science News . In short, it is very difficult to trace the source of the virus because there are so many different animal viruses, and finding the specific virus most closely related to COVID-19 is the needle in the haystack problem. … The origin of the SARS virus was not well understood until 2017, and it can take years to figure out the origin of COVID-19.