Did the coronavirus spread in Wuhan through a wholesale market or through a laboratory accident?
The search for the Corona origin is picking up speed again - under pressure from the USA.
Beijing / Munich
- The so-called laboratory leak theory is already a good year old: It is about the question of whether the coronavirus could have leaked from a laboratory in the central Chinese city of Wuhan.
The virus was first detected there at the end of December 2019.
Some do not consider it to be a coincidence that there is a laboratory in Wuhan that researches coronaviruses. In the US, ex-President Donald Trump fueled the thesis. Even a conspiracy theory according to which China deliberately created dangerous pathogens as biological weapons in Wuhan was haunted at the time - but largely disappeared in the moth box. Democrats and scientists generally rejected the laboratory orthosis as nonsense - among other things in a statement in the medical journal
The Lancet
, which the Berlin virologist Christian Drosten also signed.
The laboratory in question is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The internationally renowned virologist Shi Zhengli has been researching coronaviruses in bats there for years.
Shi rejects the allegations against her laboratory - most recently a few days ago in a written interview with the
New York Times
.
“I don't know how the world got to pouring dirt over an innocent scientist,” she wrote in a text message to the newspaper.
Origin of the coronavirus: Joe Biden hires secret services
The new US President Joe Biden has by no means put the question of the origin to the files.
In March he asked his secret services to clarify what the thesis of a “lab leak” was all about.
Freed from the stigma of Trump racism, more experts are now investigating the thesis - and even former “Lab Leak” opponents now consider it at least plausible.
The
Wall Street Journal
recently reported, citing intelligence sources, that three employees at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) were ill with Covid-like symptoms at the beginning of the outbreak in late 2019.
The institute has been researching coronaviruses in bats and their possible dangers for humans for years.
China rejects laboratory leak theory as "absurd"
China angrily rejects laboratory theory. The most recent exchange of blows only took place last Friday. On the sidelines of the G7 summit, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged China's top diplomat Yang Jiechi to finally shed light on the darkness. Blinken asked China to let experts from the World Health Organization into the country a second time. Yang, on the other hand, angrily described the theory of a laboratory accident as "absurd." The US is trying to politicize the virus.
The EU had also made a statement shortly before the G7 summit.
“The world has a right to know exactly what happened in order to learn the lessons from it,” said Council President Charles Michel.
The EU will support all efforts to create transparency and to find out the truth.
In their final declaration on Sunday, the G7 called for a further investigation into the origins of the corona.
Corona outbreak in Wuhan: Outbreak on wholesale market still most likely
So far, most experts continue to assume that the outbreak in Wuhan is not due to the WIV, but to the Huanan wholesale market.
Live exotic animals were also sold there for consumption - crawling cats, badgers and pangolins, for example.
Many traces of Sars-CoV-2 have been discovered in and around the Huanan market, which the WHO confirms.
The WIV is only twelve kilometers away.
WIV researcher Shi Zhengli, known as "Batwoman" (bat woman) for her research in caves, was part of the team that identified a bat species as the origin of the first coronavirus to go around the world in 2004.
Shi Zhengli is internationally recognized and has been warning of a new bat coronavirus pandemic for years.
One of the laboratories at the WIV operates under the highest biosafety standard BSL4.
There are only 59 such laboratories worldwide, in China the WIV is one of two.
However, according to the current state of knowledge, bat viruses cannot infect humans directly, but need another animal as an intermediate host - such as those that are sold on the market.
Virology Institute in China: US funding apparently also flowed to Wuhan
The WIV has been cooperating with US researchers for years - and even US funding has flowed there, as recently became known. According to US newspaper reports, money from the US National Institutes of Health, the most important US authority for biomedical research, went to bat research projects by Shi Zhengli at the WIV through the charitable organization “EcoHealth Alliance” of the British-American health ecologist Peter Daszak. Daszak and Shi have been working together for a long time. The fact that Daszak, of all people, was a member of the 13-strong WHO delegation that traveled to Wuhan in early 2021 to look for the origin of the virus raised some eyebrows.
At the end of March, the WHO team (from twelve countries including China) presented its findings. According to this, the virus could have originated in bats decades ago and spread to humans via host animals after many mutations. They described the laboratory orthosis as "extremely unlikely". WHO Director General Tedros Ghebreyesus noted, however, that team members had reported to him "difficulties in accessing raw data".
The WHO team was denied access to epidemiological data from the earliest 174 cases,
according to the
Economist
magazine
.
The role of animal markets like the one in Wuhan in the transmission is still unclear, said Tedros.
The assessments of several laboratories in Wuhan are also not sufficient to rule out a “lab leak”.
The science
magazine Nature
quoted Daszak as saying that the team had answers to all questions: "The only evidence people have of a laboratory leak is that there is a laboratory in Wuhan."
Corona outbreak in Wuhan: Biden wants intelligence report in 90 days
At the end of May, Biden said he had hired three US intelligence agencies in March.
Two of them were now prone to natural transmission, one more to the laboratory orthosis.
He has now asked the services to report back to him again in 90 days.
The US chief virologist Anthony Fauci also called on China to hand over the medical files of WIV employees.
Fauci, who is under domestic political pressure because of the revelations about the WIV funding, continues to assume that the virus is transmitted naturally.
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Street stall in Wuhan: Life in the metropolis is back to normal - but where exactly in the city did the virus break out in 2019?
© HECTOR RETAMAL / AFP
China's President Xi Jinping rejects the laboratory leak thesis as a crude conspiracy theory and considers the investigations to be complete.
China prefers to emphasize that it has itself fought the virus far more successfully than the US or Europe.
As long as Beijing blocks further investigations, it cannot refute the allegations - such as new speculations that the WIV did not always correctly follow its own security rules.
Beijing's measures meanwhile show that the government itself must be clear that not everything was going well at the beginning of the pandemic.
After the initial cover-up of the outbreak in Wuhan, the central government dismissed senior officials in the region, announced the accelerated passage of a planned biosecurity law and permanently banned the sale and consumption of wild animals.
Virologists in Wuhan: No employee infected with corona - all samples traced
The WIV meanwhile emphasizes that no employee of the high-security laboratory was infected with Covid-19.
The laboratory held samples from employees for a year and examined them again retrospectively in January 2020, the state newspaper "Global Times" recently reported, citing laboratory director Yuan Zhiming.
In an interview with
Scientific American
magazine
Shi Zhengli said in the summer of 2020 that she was worried that the virus might have escaped from her laboratory. She therefore quickly compared all the samples from the last few years with the new virus. But, to her great relief, none of the new sequences matched those of the viruses that her team had collected in bat caves. "I hadn't slept in days," she told the magazine. The investigation into the causes will probably take a long time.
