Paris, Friday April 21, 2023 – The Academy of Medicine has organized a conference that appears to support the theory that the Covid-19 pandemic was caused by a laboratory accident.
In 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic plunged the world into an unprecedented crisis, publicly declaring that SARS-Cov-2 had escaped from a laboratory (specifically the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, China) earned you to be treated at best as a madman, at worst as a conspiratorial admirer of Donald Trump. All serious scientists agreed in saying (publicly anyway) that SARS-Cov-2 had appeared naturally, that it had been transmitted from bats to humans via an intermediate animal and that the thesis of the lab accident was just a conspiracy theory created to discredit China.
Three years later, things have changed dramatically. More and more scientists consider the possibility that the Covid-19 pandemic was triggered by a laboratory accident to be serious, even though the hypothetical natural origin of the virus has not been found. In the United States, the issue has taken a political turn, with the FBI and the Department of Energy now officially defending the theory of the laboratory accident, while the Republicans accuse the Democrats of trying to hide the truth from the general public. audience. In France, on the other hand, the question is rarely debated publicly (perhaps because the famous P4 laboratory in Wuhan accused of being at the origin of the pandemic was implemented in collaboration with French researchers). In 2021, the government said it did not want ” politicize the subject of the origin of the virus ».
The mystery of the furin cleavage site
The holding this Tuesday at the Academy of Medicine of a session devoted to the theory of the laboratory accident (without confirming it) is therefore an unprecedented event for the French scientific community, marking all the progress made by this thesis. initially considered conspiratorial. titled ” From the origin of Sars-Cov-2 to dangerous virology/biology », this conference was an opportunity to present the various elements supporting the hypothesis that SARS-Cov-2 was created in the laboratory, possibly via so-called gain-of-function experiments, consisting of artificially increasing the pathogenicity of a virus.
The intervention of Marc Eloit particularly marked the spirits. Calling himself ” virus sinner “, this virologist from the Institut Pasteur explained how he and his team went to Laos in 2021 in search of the origin of the virus. Why in Laos and not in China? Quite simply because Beijing has banned any international investigation into the origin of the virus on its territory.
In Laos, Marc Eloit discovered a virus in bats, which he called Banal-52, 97% similar to SARS-Cov-2. Main difference between the two viruses: Banal-52 does not have a furin cleavage site, a particularity which explains the very high contagiousness of SARS-Cov-2 in humans. However, by carrying out several passages of Banal-52 in genetically modified mice having cellular receptors close to those of men, Marc Eloit has apparently demonstrated that this furin site could not appear naturally.
The danger of gain-of-function experiments
If it is a simple doubt that Marc Eloit expressed, his colleague Patrick Berche wanted to be much more direct. For the former director of the Pasteur Institute in Lille, everything leads to believe that the virus escaped from a laboratory, starting with the inconsistencies in the thesis of natural origin. Indeed, if the virus had been born in nature, the epidemic would have appeared gradually, in several scattered outbreaks and not only in Wuhan near the P4 laboratory. ” If animals sold on the Wuhan market carried the virus, how could they have traveled hundreds of kilometers without making any case elsewhere? asks the researcher. Patrick Berche concluded his speech by referring to information revealed in 2021 by an independent group of scientists, Drastic, but which went unnoticed: before the pandemic, the P4 laboratory in Wuhan was indeed carrying out gain-of-function experiments, the Defuse project, of inserting furin sites into bat viruses.
If the Academy of Medicine did not openly take a position for one or the other of the hypotheses by organizing this conference, the aim was in particular to highlight a point often ignored by the French scientific community, namely the risk featured by high security labs and gain-of-function experiments. The virologist Simon Wain-Hobson has also clearly asked for the banning of these experiments, which he considers far too dangerous. ” The promise of being able to predict the strain responsible for the next pandemic and thus to provide a vaccine or a treatment is a pipe. launches the virologist.
« We must train our young researchers in these questions of responsibility for their research activities “Explains for her part the virologist Christine Rouzioux, who believes that we have in France” great difficulty in launching training in doctoral schools on the subject of research being used as biological weapons. Far from diminishing, the risk is on the increase worldwide. Since 2020, P3 and P4 laboratories handling highly dangerous pathogens have multiplied around the world, including in countries that do not a priori have all the required security conditions, such as Côte d’Ivoire, Kazakhstan or Arabia. Arabia.
Quentin Haroche
