FWithout extensive official investigation in China and definitive proof, the exact origin of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus causing Covid-19, is still an open question.
The spatial distribution of the first known cases around the “seafood” market of Huanan, in Wuhan, the testimony of the presence of living mammals in this same market, and the reconstructions of the evolutionary history of the virus using genetic data available to us points in the direction of a market-related natural origin, as was assumed in the early days of the pandemic, including officially in China.
However, the extraordinary coincidence represented by the detection of a new SARS-type coronavirus in a city hosting a large research center working on these pathogens is enough to force us to take seriously the possibility of an origin linked to activities of research. The hypothesis is also mentioned by the SAGO, a scientific advisory group set up by the World Health Organization (WHO) on the subject of the origin of new pathogens.
In parallel with this legitimate questioning, a whole conspiratorial mythology has developed involving the Wuhan laboratory and its collaborators. The vagueness of the Wuhan researchers when presenting the RaTG13 virus, at the time the closest known “cousin” of SARS-CoV-2, was the source of much speculation, later rendered obsolete by the discovery, at the Laos, viruses even closer to SARS-CoV-2.
Adaptable theories
Never mind: the story of a secret research program around the Yunnanese cave of Mojiang and the viruses it contained has been adapted and moved to Laos. For a time dismissed, the hypothesis of deliberate genetic manipulation has come back into the spotlight with the leak of a research project proposed to an American military agency in 2018, but ultimately unfunded – and too bad if the manipulations in question were to take place in the United States and not in Wuhan… While in the United States, a recent report by elected Republicans puts forward the hypothesis of a virus linked to the development of biological weapons.
The Wuhan laboratory is not the only target of these conspiracy theories: Western scientists are also accused of having sought to nip in the bud any discussion of an artificial origin of SARS-CoV-2, because it would threaten their interests.
In mid-2021, we learned, on the basis of largely redacted emails, that several specialists had very early raised the question of an artificial origin of SARS-CoV-2. A summit teleconference was held on 1is February 2020, involving White House science adviser Anthony Fauci.
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