Now with more than three million deaths worldwide, the COVID-19 origin remains uncertain. For more than a year now, this pandemic has disrupted lives anywhere in the world.
In what follows, according to a The Wire report, the virus that caused this global health crisis is officially called SARS-CoV-2 or SARS2, for short.
And, as a lot of people know, there are two fundamental theories on the COVID-19 origins. One is that it naturally jumped from wildlife to humans.
The other is that this coronavirus was an understudy in a laboratory, from which it escaped. It certainly matters a great deal which is the case if the second-mentioned occurrence is hoped to be prevented.
Resemblance with SARS 1 and MERS
In December 2019, after the pandemic initially broke out, Chinese authorities reported that many circumstances had taken place in the wet market, a place in Wuhan, selling animals for meat.
This, this report specified, reminded experts of the 2002 SARS1 epidemic in which a bat virus had spread initially to civets, an animal sold in wet markets. Then, from civets, the virus got transferred to humans.
In 2012, a similar bat virus brought a second epidemic called MERS. This time, reports said, the intermediate host animal was camels.
The virus's genome's decoding presented it belonged to a viral family called "beta-coronaviruses" to which the two viruses mentioned also belong.
Essentially, the association supported the notion that, like them, it was a natural virus that had managed to jump from bats to another animal host to humans.
The wet market association, on the other hand, the only other point of resemblance with MERS and SARS1 epidemics, was soon broken when Chinese scientists discovered earlier cases in Wuhan without connection to the wet market.
However, that appeared not to matter when so much more evidence supporting natural occurrence was expected soon after.
Nevertheless, Wuhan is considered the home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the world's leading research center for coronavirus types. Therefore, the probability that the SARS2 virus had escaped from the laboratory could not be ruled out.
Is It Natural Emergence?
From early on, both perceptions from the public and media were shaped favoring that of the natural emergence circumstance by strong statements from two scientific groups. Such statements were not initially evaluated as critically as they should have been.
According to a group of virologists, as well as others, wrote in February 2020, the Lancet when it was actually far too soon for anyone to be certain what had happened.
Here, scientists overwhelmingly concluded that the Origins of COVID-19 came from the wildlife. Such a claim came with a stirring rallying call for readers to stand with Chinese colleagues on the frontline of the battle against the killer disease.
Opposite the letter writer's declaration, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a laboratory raised as an accident rather than a conspiracy. It certainly needed to be explored, not declined out of hand.
COVID-19 Origins Not Intentionally Manipulated
An essential indication of good researchers is that they go through great pains to differentiate between what they already know and what they do not know.
On the contrary, a second letter that had an enormous impact in shaping the attitudes of the public was an opinion article and not science-based published in the Nature Medicine journal in March 2020.
Authors of this group said their analyses clearly present that COVID-19 origins were not from a laboratory or intentionally manipulated.
If the case that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory is so significant, it remains unknown why this is not more commonly known. As may now be evident, there are lots of people who have a reason not to discuss it.
The list is led, certainly, by the Chinese authorities. Nevertheless, virologists in the United States and Europe did not show any great interest in flaring up or kindling a public debate about the "gain-of-function experiments" that their respective community has been undertaking for years.
The related report is shown on NBC News's YouTube video below:
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