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Origin of the coronavirus: Laboratory workers in Wuhan apparently ill before the outbreak of the pandemic

2021-05-24T23:08:25.566Z


Employees of a Chinese research laboratory are said to have been infected with Covid-19 as early as November 2019. This emerges from a US intelligence report and supports the US laboratory leak theory.


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The Wuhan Institute of Virology: It is still unclear whether the virus got into the environment there

Photo: THOMAS PETER / REUTERS

Even a year and a half after the first corona outbreak, it is not clear where the coronavirus first entered the environment and how it infected the first person.

There is no shortage of unconfirmed assumptions: For the first time, it was transferred to humans on a larger scale at an animal market in Wuhan, China - these were the first reports.

Transmission through frozen meat or the wildlife trade are also under discussion as possible origins.

But rumors kept circulating that the virus could also have been released by a laboratory accident in a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan - and so the pandemic then took its course.

This theory is now receiving new impetus: According to the US intelligence report, three researchers from the Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) visited a hospital in November 2019 because they had symptoms similar to Covid-19, as the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday .

According to the secret service report, the laboratory employees suffered from a Covid 19 infection weeks before the first virus outbreak in December 2019.

Accordingly, it is more likely that the virus was accidentally released at the institute in Wuhan.

US State Department doubts laboratory workers' credibility

The US State Department has been following this suspicion for some time and announced in a January announcement that there was "reason to believe" that several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were confronted with "symptoms associated with both COVID-19 as well as being consistent with common seasonal diseases «.

However, more precise information about when the researchers were admitted to the hospital or what symptoms they had exactly have been missing so far.

"That raises questions about the credibility of the leading WIV researcher Shi Zhengli," writes the Foreign Ministry.

The background to this is the laboratory employee's claim that there were no cases of Covid-19 infections at the institute before the outbreak in Wuhan.

But now the intelligence report provides new details.

The US authorities suspect that China could be responsible for the pandemic: Accidental infections in Chinese laboratories have led to virus outbreaks earlier, it is said.

Including a 2004 Sars outbreak in Beijing that infected nine people and killed one.

In addition, international coronavirus research was a focus of the WIV.

Since 2016, experiments and investigations on mice, bats and pangolins have taken place in the laboratories in Wuhan.

China rejects the allegations

"The US continues to work on the laboratory leak theory," commented the Chinese Foreign Ministry in a statement to the "Wall Street Journal".

In its statement, China's foreign ministry referred to the results of the World Health Organization in March.

The report showed that it was "extremely unlikely" that Covid-19 came from a laboratory leak;

rather, the virus was transmitted from bats to humans.

According to the latest WHO report, which was officially presented to the public at the end of March, the experts classified it as "extremely unlikely" that the virus accidentally escaped from a laboratory.

However, according to the report, almost all questions are still open.

What the WHO experts know for sure is not much: the virus developed in bats;

the closest relationship to Sars-CoV-2 was found here.

However, there are changes between the genomes that must have taken several decades of evolution to complete.

That is why the virus "probably to very likely" passed on to another animal, perhaps a pangolin.

Where and how this happened is still open.

However, WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus said in March that there should also be a further study of the laboratory leak theory.

He sees a need for that.

"Additional missions with specialized experts, which I am willing to send," are conceivable, says Tedros.

There are also allegations that China is keeping data and information under lock and key.

China wants to prevent being pilloried as the cause of the pandemic.

Critics suspect that the country did not give the 17 international experts of the WHO investigation every desired access and put pressure on it to produce the report.

However, participants rejected this.

sug / reuters

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2021-05-24

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