A virus born in the laboratory or from animal-human passage? Demand has rebounded in the three years of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic that we have experienced. And now that the virus, although still circulating among us, has largely disappeared, the issue is back in the foreground. A revelation from the British newspaper helps fuel it The Telegraphwhich reported a hitherto unknown fact: “During a meeting of the alliance between intelligence services, known as Five Eyes group (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia) which took place in January 2021, the issue had been discussed.” We talk about the fact that the United States shared “stunning” evidence with the United Kingdom at the height of the Covid pandemic, evidence that suggests a “high probability that the virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory”.
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The US version
Going into detail, as reported by the English newspaper “the United States reported that China had hidden military and research activities on the coronavirus in a laboratory in Wuhan”. And, again according to the Telegraph“in a previous phone call the then US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, presented evidence in support of this theory to the former British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab and to their counterparts in Canada, New Zealand and Australia.”
But there’s more. Two sources from the former presidential administration led by Donald Trump – at the time in power in the USA – spoke with the Telegraph and accused Raab and the British government of having ignored the theory of the escape of the virus from the laboratory due to the reticence expressed by the government health team which, at that stage of the pandemic, firmly supported a natural evolution of the pathogen.
“Stunning Information”
The comment of a former US official who worked with intelligence, and also with former Secretary Pompeo, was telling: “We saw several pieces of information and we thought it was, frankly, astounding,” he said. Pointing out: “Obviously there was a high probability that this was indeed a virus that had escaped from a laboratory,” arguing that a State Department document pointed to “constant obstructionism” by China after the discovery of the virus and blamed officials of Beijing of “gross corruption and ineptitude”.
The research also revealed for the first time another sobering detail: “Chinese military officers had worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the years preceding the pandemic” and “some researchers in the laboratory had fallen ill shortly before the first cases of Covid infection were recorded in Wuhan”.
The two sources from the former Trump presidential administration finally explained that “at the time of the facts the United Kingdom ignored the evidence presented by the United States” because the London government labeled the information on the potential leakage of the virus from the laboratory as a “political issue radioactive US” fueled by public disagreement between government scientists and Donald Trump.
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The Chinese admission
But let’s return to the debate on the possible origins of Covid. The first storm generated by a declaration dates back to May 2023, that time coming from China, a country that was the first to experience the effects of the pandemic in 2019 or perhaps even in the previous months, which attributed the birth of the virus to a laboratory experiment .
A possible admission, as it was read, which did not exclude that thesis: the BBC had reported it through an interview with George Gaoformer head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control (CDC) until 2022 and current vice president of National Natural Science Foundation of China.
The hypotheses of the Chinese immunologist
Gao, a world-renowned virologist and immunologist, played a key role in the response to the pandemic and in efforts to trace its origins. It should be said that Beijing had rejected any suggestion that the infection may have originated in Wuhan Institute of Virology (Wil)the laboratory in the capital city of Hubei where the virus was first detected in late 2019. But Gao was less peremptory on the topic, observing: “You can always suspect anything. This is science. Don’t rule anything out.”
A possible sign that Beijing may have taken the lab leak theory more seriously than its official statements suggest? Gao had stated: “The government has organized something”, adding that “that laboratory (Wil, ed.) has been rechecked by experts”.
The chronology of the Covid emergency 05 May 2023
Laboratory under investigation
May last year was the first admission that China was completing an officially conducted investigation. In this regard, the scientist said that he had not seen the results, but that he had “heard” that the laboratory had passed the test. “I think the conclusion is that they are following all the protocols – he underlined on that occasion -. They have not found any wrongdoing”.
Returning to the official record, one of the most popular hypotheses was that the virus had been transmitted from bats to humans, perhaps through other animals. A scenario supported by many scientists, although other experts had noted a lack of sufficient evidence to rule out the main alternative possibility: that the virus had infected someone involved in research designed to better understand the threat it produces in nature. Now, thanks to new revelations, will the truth be more accessible?