The scientific community, especially in China, continues to investigate the origins of the new coronavirus without preliminary results being known to date. The World Health Organization (WHO) after its initial investigation into the origin of the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan, noted that there is no evidence that it is a laboratory-made virus and insisted that the sale of wild animals for its consumption, especially the bat, is the most viable hypothesis to determine where the so-called ‘patient zero’ that started the chain of contagion arose.
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Some media, without citing sources, have revealed that a theory of “increasing veracity” among US intelligence agencies is that covid-19 may have been created in a Wuhan laboratory that it has worked precisely with the coronavirus in order to increase its medical scientific capacity and respond more quickly to new outbreaks and mutations.
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Just citing anonymous sources, the news channel Fox News He stresses that the virus was not produced as a biological weapon, but seeking to identify and combat infectious diseases as the United States does. Those sources indicate that ‘patient zero’ worked in the laboratory of the Wuhan Virology Institute (WIV) and it was this same employee who infected others in that community.
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But it is not the only medium that has mentioned this theory. The capital newspaper The Washington Post reported this week, this time citing countless specific sources and documents, that US Embassy officials in Beijing warned in January 2018 of inadequate measures taken in the Wuhan laboratory, noting that scientists are conducting risky investigations into the bat coronavirus. .
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“The (diplomatic) cables have fueled discussions within the US government as to whether this or any other Wuhan laboratory was the source of the virus, even though no conclusive evidence has yet emerged,” the newspaper said.
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The media indicates that between January and March 2018, American scientists visited the Wuhan Virology Institute, which three years earlier had become the first laboratory in China to achieve the highest level of international safety in biological research.
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But the tours inside their facilities ended up alarming US officials, and they sent two diplomatic cables classified as sensitive, in which they warned about security and management weaknesses in the WIV laboratory and asked for more attention to their experiments.
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Bat research
According to him Post, the first cable mentions that both the laboratory work on bat coronaviruses, and their possible transmission to humans, represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.
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“During interactions with scientists in the WIV laboratory, they noted that the new laboratory has a severe shortage of properly trained technicians and researchers needed to operate this high containment laboratory safely,” the cable stated on January 19, 2018, which It was written by two officials from the environment, science and health sections of the embassy in China who met with Chinese scientists.
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At the time, WIV researchers were receiving help from the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas and other American organizations.
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Reports suggested that the US should provide more support to the Wuhan laboratory, stressing that its research on the bat coronavirus was not only important, but dangerous. It is unclear what kind of actions the US government took.
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In November 2017, prior to the laboratory visit, the project chief, Shi Zhengli, had published research showing that the Chinese horseshoe bats or rhinolophids that they had collected from a cave in Yunan province were likely from the same population that spawned the SARS coronavirus in 2003.
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This animal has an immune system that allows it to coexist with many disease-causing viruses without contagion. That has been a great unknown for science. Both the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) epidemics were caused by bat coronaviruses.
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“We hear the story more and more”
The Chinese government has rejected the suspicion that the outbreak of the new coronavirus (SARS-COV-2) whose disease is covid-19 arose from the Wuhan laboratory. Its foreign ministry cites statements from the World Health Organization (WHO) that there is currently no evidence that the coronavirus comes from a laboratory.
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Meanwhile, President Donald Trump said at a press conference on Wednesday that he is aware of this theory. “We are hearing the story more and more … we are doing a very complete examination of this horrible situation,” he said.
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On several occasions, the president has called the covid-19 as “The Chinese virus”, even replacing the word “crown” with “Chinese” in one of his speeches written on March 19.
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Speaking to the program Fox’s The Story, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday that the US “is working diligently” to determine the origins of covid-19 and that they currently know that it emerged in Wuhan and that the market where they sell bats is near the laboratory in question. .
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Pompeo also mentioned that the laboratory “contained highly contagious materials, we knew it, we knew they were working on this program.”
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In February, when 12 cases of covid-19 were reported in a handful of states, the White House asked scientists to investigate the origins of the outbreak in response to rumors spread online.
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Then, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) requested in a letter sent to the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine that its experts focus on determining “quickly” how the virus was created to address the incipient spread and “to inform the preparation of future outbreaks and to better understand the transmission aspects”.
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