Three years and three months after its appearance, the virus that caused the largest known pandemic in recent history remains a mystery. Yes, we know that the disease is caused by a respiratory pathogen of the SARS-Cov type. Yes, we know that it started in an outbreak in China. yes we know that its genesis is most likely zoonotic (from an animal). But, as much as the international health authorities claim otherwise, we do not have a clear idea of what the real origin of the first infections is. In fact, the question of the real origin of the pandemic continues to this day to be the cause of a bitter scientific controversy. The controversy now revolves around an irresolvable dichotomy: Did the first infections come from contact with an infected animal or were they caused by the escape of a virus from a laboratory building in Wuhan?
Until last week, the discussion was no more than food for debate in scientific circles. But the latest report from the US Department of Energy has elevated it to the category of international crisis. At least, embryonic crisis.
The study, classified as confidential but leaked to the Wall Street Journal concluded that “with a reduced degree of confidence”, SARS-Cov-2 could be a microorganism stored in a Chinese laboratory and that escaped into the external environment shortly before the first chain infections began in the Asian country.
A week after the information leaked, the controversy has not subsided. In fact, other nuances related to science, geopolitics and the development of that have emerged in it. new latent cold war between China and the United States.
Suffice it to observe the reaction of some political representatives of the United States Republican Party, who have not been slow to embrace the thesis of laboratory origin. Without going any further, Senator Tom Cotton requested on Twitter that the Chinese authorities be denounced internationally so that “an escape of this type never happens again.”
The joy of some politicians does not match, however, with the scientific evidence. In reality, no technical details of the Energy Agency thesis have been disclosed and most of the world institutions with academic authority in the matter of large infections are skeptical of the idea of a laboratory leak.
Four other US intelligence agencies have come to the fore to offer opposing views. They point to the greater probability of a natural origin of the pandemic and rule out that we are in a position to ensure, today, what really happened.
The leaked report now comes at a time of maximum uncertainty. Just a couple of weeks after an editorial in Nature magazine denounced the stoppage of official investigations into the origin of evil. World Health Organization he failed miserably in his first attempt to draw a reliable film of the events. The commission that the WHO sent to China encountered too many official difficulties to investigate and returned home last year with more questions than answers. In his report, he bet on the idea that the origin of the disease was a zoonotic transmission from an animal to a human being. But there were a couple of gaps too thick. The first, the impossibility of identifying the precise path that the virus followed between animal (it is not even known which animal) and human. The second was even more surprising: the WHO did not absolutely rule out that the pathogen could have escaped from a laboratory, although it considered this thesis the least likely.
Science has much more historical evidence to justify a natural origin of the pandemic. Globally speaking, the SARS-like virus They have given more than one example of zoonotic transmission, before Covid-19. But that’s not saying much. Defining exactly how and where a virus has jumped from animals to humans is a very difficult task. We still do not know well, for example, where Ebola really arose. Cases of animal-human transmission are more common than we think. The most common explanation for each case of a pandemic is usually that.
But it is no less true that there is evidence that at least one Chinese laboratory in Wuhan was working with biological material compatible with the presence of a SARS-type virus. Investigations, however, have not been able to determine what type of virus it was. Before the pandemic, the same Wuhan lab had worked on close cousins of SARS-CoV-2. For example, him coronavirus RaTG13. that microorganism shares 96.2 percent of the DNA with the cause of the pandemic.
Experts are increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of one day knowing the true origin of evil. All attempts to trace the epidemic back to “animal zero”, the cause of the supposed zoonosis, have been unsuccessful. There are dozens of statistical and epidemiological works that allow closing the circle of the first infections around the famous Huanan market in Wuhan. But no one is able to determine if the first infections emerged in that circle or it was simply the secondary recipient of a chain of infections that had already been born elsewhere. The bad thing is that the Chinese authorities do not help at all to solve the problem. The lack of transparency about laboratory activities and the fact that near-market facilities were closed and cleaned up shortly after the first outbreaks leave the scientific community bereft of investigative tools.
In this scenario, conspiracy theories of all kinds emerge. Especially if they allow the tension between the United States and China to amplify on account of the increasingly harsh trade war between the two countries. The thesis of the human origin of the epidemic may be at the same level as the fear of Chinese balloons, the commercial drawbacks of Asian electric cars and the blocking of the TikTok social network. Or it may be a hidden reality to which we will hardly have access.
