What if the conspirators weren't that fanciful after all? In a letter published on May 13 in the American journal
Science
, twenty scientists attest that the accidental origin of the virus, which could have escaped from the laboratory in Wuhan, China, was wrongly ruled out. In May 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) team responsible for studying the origin of the virus had thus evaluated the hypothesis of “
zoonotic overflow
” as “
probable or even very probable
”, to the detriment of a human incident "
extremely unlikely
", without there being however "
no conclusion which clearly favors a natural propagation or a laboratory accident
", Say the scientists.
However, this conclusion was given, according to them, by the Chinese part of the WHO team.
“
The two hypotheses have not received the same consideration,
” point out the researchers in their correspondence.
To discover
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This publication comes just hours after the disclosure on Twitter of three academic works conducted between 2014 and 2019 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Distributed by the account of an anonymous scientist, the three memoirs, which have so far remained in the archives despite the important information they contain, mention in particular inconsistencies with the data provided by the WIV since the start of the pandemic. on the number and nature of coronaviruses stored in the laboratory, and on the experiments carried out on these viruses. According to several experts consulted by
Le Monde
, academic work even calls into question the integrity of the viral genetic sequences published in recent months by the Wuhan research institution to explain the appearance of the virus.
Read also: Covid: in Wuhan, the virus was widely circulating from December 2019
High-level American scientists are calling for a "
transparent and objective
"
investigation
, urging not to favor any hypothesis until more data has been collected.
Among the signatories, microbiologist David Relman of Stanford University and virologist Jesse Bloom of the University of Washington, but also Ralph Baric, a microbiologist among the world's best specialists in coronaviruses, and who has already worked closely with the WIV.