The origin of Covid and the new clues that return to focus on the escape from the Wuhan laboratory – breaking latest news

NEW YORK – The pendulum of the search for the causes of the spread of the coronavirus epidemic is moving with increasing force towards the hypothesis of escape from a Chinese laboratory – in all probability the Wuhan Institute of Virology
– where experiments were carried out for the manipulation of viral strains.

Almost certainly the smoking gun that would allow us to demonstrate with certainty that the Covid-19 virus came out of an animal market or, by mistake (no one believes that an attempt was in progress to produce biological weapons), from a laboratory, will not be found. never. But thehypothesis of a virus manipulated in laboratories and escaped due to lack of safety procedures and limited availability of specialized personnel, already circulating in 2020 and immediately discarded as an inconsistent inference, in recent weeks it has greatly strengthened.

Two and a half years ago the main proponent of the thesis of the intervention of a human hand was the then president Trump who, with his taste for thundering words and the tendency to treat even the most delicate and vital issues as freak phenomena, had started calling Covid -19 kung flu (flu English by influence, ndr). His will to politicize the issue it prompted many, including scientists, to back down. Yet even then there were those, such as the head of the Atlanta CDC at the time, Robert Redfield, who instead gave credit to the hypothesis of the laboratory error.

In February 2021, WHO, the World Health Organization itself, tried to put a tombstone on the issue, calling the hypothesis of human intervention extremely unlikely. But in mid-2022 the planetary health authority also changed course, inviting to investigate in depth the hypothesis of the laboratory accident.

More recently there are three factors that have shifted the balance more and more towards thehypothesis of the fabricated and escaped virus. The first is the interim report of the Republican component of the Senate Health and Education Commission. The document, presented last Thursday and signed by Senator Richard Barr, a moderate conservative who two years ago was among the few in his party to vote for Trump’s impeachment and who will leave Congress in two months without having re-nominated, the the result of a long bipartisan investigation. For now, however, the Democrats have pulled out, even though they say bipartisan collaboration will continue and that the final document could be common.

The report collects i many indications of a laboratory accident which allowed the escape of a manipulated virus. In particular, it seems unlikely that two teams of army scientists have managed to develop a vaccine, ready in February 2020, in less than two months. According to the experts who participated in the work, it is much more likely that the team had access to the genomic sequence of the virus since November 2019. Therefore, Chinese responsible for carelessness, even if the market track is not totally excluded.

The second passage is a 40-page essay resulting from the research of a team of journalists from Vanity Fair e you ProPublica
. They worked for 5 months by having all the communications coming out of the Chinese laboratories and the interactions with the Central Committee of the Communist Party analyzed by experts who speak good Mandarin and know how to decrypt the opaque and bombastic language of official political communication. Many clues suggest that in November 2019 the Wuhan laboratories were overwhelmed by a very serious emergency for which the top of the CCP and, probably, Xi Jinping himself was mobilized. Pre-crisis alarms intercepted by laboratories due to lack of economic resources and personnel to solve the complex problems that arose. A year before the disaster, the director of the institute had written in an article for a Chinese scientific journal about huge laboratory safety problems. And he warned: Manipulating viruses in the laboratory can produce great benefits, but it can also cause catastrophes.

The third element is a scientific study published by three scientists – a geneticist from Montana, a pharmacologist from Duke University and a German gynecologist – according to which the demonstration of the unnatural origin of the Covid-19 virus must be sought in the world in which they are attacked. the various segments of the genome. In nature these hinges, called restriction site (in Italian we speak of cuts with restriction enzymes), appear randomly and to a limited extent along the genome chain. When there is human intervention (many workers in the world manipulate viruses for medical and pharmacological research purposes) these cuts are, however, much more numerous and do not appear randomly (haphazardly) but are well spaced.

The three researchers claim to have experimented with their theory on the Covid-19 genome, comparing it with that of 70 other coronaviruses found in nature: the difference, they say, is glaring. Here the scientists are divided into two groups: those – few – who from the beginning considered the animal origin of the virus to be certain, dismiss the method proposed by their three colleagues as totally unreliable, fallacious. Many others, struck by the simplicity of a method that no one had thought of before, are reproducing the experiment on their sample databases, looking for confirmation. Which there will probably be, will lead to consider the highly probable genetic manipulation of the Covid-19 virus but they will not, however, allow for absolute certainty.