Where did the coronavirus COVID-19 come from?

Main article: Coronavirus COVID-19

2023

Raccoon dogs named a possible source of Covid-19

In a new analysis in March 2023, raccoon dogs appear as a possible source of Covid. Genetic material from a market in Wuhan indicates that they have been infected.

The new data linking Covid-19 to raccoon dogs in Wuhan represents "important additional evidence" supporting the hypothesis that the virus originated in the wild, according to a scientist who has studied the genesis of the pandemic in China.

The information refutes the hypothesis of a laboratory leak, says the researcher.

FBI and US Department of Energy confirm that pandemic began due to virus leak from laboratory in China

In February 2023, it became known that the US Department of Energy concluded that the Covid virus pandemic most likely arose from a data leak from the laboratory, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.

The US Department of Energy became the second federal department following the FBI, adhering to the version of the virus leak as a result of an accident in a Chinese laboratory.

FBI Director Ray said that "the source of the pandemic is most likely a potential incident in a laboratory in Wuhan."

The DOE opinion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has significant scientific expertise and controls a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.

Nevertheless, according to sources who got acquainted with the secret report, the Ministry of Energy issued its conclusion with a "low degree of confidence."

In response to a new secret report by Americans about the coronavirus and the Chinese laboratory, the Chinese newspaper Global Times asked the United States to open its suspicious biological laboratories for an international investigation, calling the report a lie.

Another 4 US agencies still believe that the virus passed from animal to human naturally, and 2, including the CIA, have not decided.

2022: Evidence found of US involvement in COVID-19

According to the American publication Vanity Fair, the US authorities funded research on the artificial creation of a new coronavirus in Wuhan, and after the start of the pandemic, they destroyed all evidence of their activities. The investigation published on March 31, 2022 is based on leaked correspondence between the US Department of Health and the US Department of Defense, as well as their contractors.

According to the publication, medical scientist Anthony Fauci, senior medical adviser to the President of the United States, silences any discussions about the causes of the COVID-19 virus in the laboratory, and not as a result of the transmission of the virus from animals to humans, after assisting one scandalous scientist in obtaining millions of dollars in federal funding for the study of bats.

According to the American edition of Vanity Fair, the US authorities funded research on the artificial creation of COVID-19 in Wuhan

The journal claims that Fauci's approval of Peter Daszak helped his nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, which protects society from emerging infectious diseases, develop the COVID-19 virus in Chinese laboratories.

A journal that studied more than 100,000 EcoHealth internal documents before the pandemic, interviewing five former employees and 33 other sources, states that although the organization's papers do not specify, where COVID came from, they show how the nonprofit worked under "murky grant agreements, weak oversight and pursuit of public funds for scientific progress, in part by conducting research at dramatically increasing risk. "

It is also claimed that researchers associated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including Daszak, tried to hide evidence of the early spread of the pandemic when hypotheses about their leakage from laboratories began to appear.

Although the report does not conclusively prove how the pandemic began, the journal cites evidence that Daszak knew that research to strengthen some of the virus's functions that his organization conducted was "risky" and neglected to provide transparency to its projects to the US government.

According to some sources, Fauci, whose institution in 2014 gave EcoHealth Alliance a grant of $3.7 million, directly contributed to the spread of the pandemic by providing funds that were used to support research to strengthen the functions of the virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

EcoHealth granted WIV nearly $600,000 in sub-contracts before the National Institutes of Health (NIH) suspended the grant in July 2020 over its controversial work, Vanity Fair reported.

While more scientists were calling for transparency about the origin of the virus, Daszak was trying to "present the laboratory leak hypothesis as a baseless and destructive conspiracy theory."

According to reports, Fauci and a small group of scientists held confidential discussions starting in February 2020, seeking to "solidify the theory of natural origin," despite the fact that "some of them privately expressed the opinion that the likelihood of a laboratory incident is higher."

Around the same time, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, allegedly called on Fauci to "actively investigate" both hypotheses, but after this proposal, Fauci suspended him.

According to other researchers, Daszak also tried to hide information about the genesis of COVID, claiming that he "categorically refused to share reports on the progress of the implementation of the research grant he disputed."

In May 2016, his $3.7 million grant raised concerns for the first time, as it began to operate for the third year, he provided only one annual report on the work done to the NIH.

When the report appeared, it said scientists wanted to "create an infectious clone of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)" despite the Obama administration's "moratorium on new federal funding for research that could make influenza, MERS or SARS viruses more virulent or transmissible."

Daszak's researchers argued that "atypical chimeras" from their experiment to enhance function "are not subject to moratorium because the strains used have not previously infected humans."

However, some researchers said Daszak's experiment was still too risky, prompting him to offer the NIH a compromise, also pointing out that the study is being conducted in China.^[1]

2021

US Congress presents a report on the development of COVID-19 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

At the end of July 2021, the leader of the Republican Party in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives of Congress USA , Mac McCaul, presented a report with allegations of evidence of what COVID-19 was developed in the laboratory of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

As stated in the report, the leak of the coronavirus could have occurred before September 12, 2019. Scientists of the Chinese Institute, with the assistance of American experts and state funds of China and the United States, tried to modify the coronavirus.

McCaul, in statements timed to coincide with the release of the report, calls on Congress to pass a law on sanctions against scientists from the laboratory in Wuhan and officials of the Chinese Communist Party.

WHO linked cause of coronavirus to bats

At the end of March 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) named, in its opinion, the most likely cause of the emergence of the coronavirus COVID-19 - when transmitted from bats to humans through another animal.

This was reported in the final joint study of WHO and PRC specialists. It emphasizes that laboratory leaks are "extremely unlikely."

According to the researchers, the spread of the virus through cold chain foods is possible, but unlikely. The findings are largely based on a visit by a group of international WHO experts to the Chinese city of Wuhan, where COVID-19 was first detected.

WHO linked cause of COVID-19 to bats

It is noted that the closest relative of the coronavirus that caused the pandemic was found in bats, however, "the evolutionary distance between these bat viruses and SARS-CoV-2 is estimated at several decades, so it is assumed that there is an intermediate link." The report indicates that very similar viruses were found in pangolins, however minks and cats are also susceptible to this infection, so that they could also act as vectors.

The hypothesis that the leak from the laboratory is to blame is extremely unlikely... And this is not a hypothesis that requires further study as part of the search for the source of origin of the virus, "said Peter Ben Embarek, WHO expert on zoonotic infections and food security, at a press conference on the results of the mission in China.

Suggestions that the virus could have leaked from the laboratory, in particular, were voiced by former President USA Donald Trump and ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Trump has said the leak may have been due to the incompetence of Chinese scientists. Pompeo also spoke about this, he referred to data that indicated that "it all started near the laboratory." These assumptions have always been dismissed in China.

Ben Embarek also said that COVID-19 initially most likely began to spread in bats, but the disease hardly came to Wuhan through these animals.^[2]

2020

USA: Zero patient infected in a biological laboratory in Wuhan, China

A new type of coronavirus COVID-19 arose in the Wuhan laboratory, its employee became "patient zero," Fox News reported, citing sources on April 15, 2020.

A laboratory in Wuhan was built in 2017 as part of a Chinese program to ensure bio safety and study viruses. The construction of a bio laboratory in Wuhan was underway as part of a program to create a network of bio laboratories (7 institutes laboratories) throughout mainland China by 2025.

The National Bio Laboratory in Wuhan (Institute of Virology) was the first in mainland China to investigate most high-risk viral pathogens.

The laboratory in Wuhan was certified as meeting the BSL-4 safety standards and criteria.

The first BSL-4 laboratory, for example, in Japan, was built in 1981, but did not work with pathogens until 2015 due to an imperfect security system.

The laboratory in Wuhan cost 300 million yuan (US $44 million) and its construction began in 2003. The laboratory was built on the wave of the global SARS epidemic.

Chinese virologists at a laboratory in Wuhan were engaged in specialized research on pathogens that cause SARS, Ebola virus and other viral diseases.

Chinese employees of the Wuhan laboratory specialized in Lyon (France).

The main goal of the Wuhan laboratory was research to protect Chinese workers from viral diseases in Africa; conducting research on the protection and adaptation of viruses.

The laboratory paid special attention to research on viruses that are transmitted from animals to humans.

In particular, the laboratory conducted research on monkeys.

Back in 2007 , a group of researchers from Wuhan, together with an Australian laboratory, conducted a study with SARS, SARS-like coronavirus and VICh-1. They decided to create a pseudovirus in which, in fact, SARS-like CoV was placed in the HIV shell . And with this virus, they infected bats.

In early May 2020, the Daily Telegraph published a dossier collected by the intelligence services of the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, according to which the Shi Zhengli group, which worked in the Wuhan Virus Laboratory, specialized in the study of bat coronaviruses.

Shi Zhengli

And here, a series of puzzling coincidences:

2013: Shi Zhengli's group conducts a study of bat fecal samples in a cave in Yongnan province. Virus samples by 96.2% coincide with SARS-CoV-2

2015: The group conducts experiments to synthesize SARS-like coronaviruses to prove that they can be transmitted from bat to human.

March 2019: Shi Zhengli publishes the scientific work "Bat Coronaviruses," where she talks about their high potential and the possibility of transmission to humans.

Meanwhile, back in 2017, international experts drew attention to the low level of security of Chinese laboratories. In particular, they indicated that several serious unauthorized leaks of the SARS coronavirus occurred from Chinese laboratories during 2014-2017.

About the laboratory in Wuhan and about the risks wrote in 2017 See Nature, PDF.

On April 13, 2020, the Washington Post reported that American diplomats in China in 2018 allegedly sent two diplomatic cables to Washington after visiting a laboratory in Wuhan, expressing concern about compliance with security conditions and the professionalism of laboratory employees. One of the telegrams says that the ongoing work on coronavirus in bats and its potential transmission to humans poses a threat of an outbreak of a new SARS pandemic.

The US State Department did not take any action after these telegrams.

The Institute of Virology is 20 miles from the seafood market. A laboratory employee accidentally contracted the coronavirus from a bat in the laboratory, and then spread it to residents of the city.

Later in February 2021, at a WHO press conference after 4 weeks of investigation into the origin of Covid-19 in China, it was announced that:

• WHO experts have recognized the version of the spread of coronavirus due to a laboratory leak as unlikely, this version will no longer be studied.

• There is no evidence of the spread of coronavirus in Wuhan until December 2019.

• Based on the available data, it is impossible to establish exactly how Covid-19 got to the Wuhan market, where it was first discovered.

• The source of Covid-19 among animals has not yet been determined.

• Animal-to-human transmission through the intermediate link is the most likely hypothesis of the origin of the coronavirus.

China: First person infected from bat directly or through another animal

COVID-19 is a zoonotic virus. Dominant among epidemiologists is the view that bats were the source of the virus.

Then the virus - either directly or through another animal - came to a person. I must say that such a transition is extremely rare, it happens with one in a million or even a billion viruses, for this many conditions must coincide. However, if this happened, that the further process is very active: the immunity of the next carrier is not adapted to the virus, it can be much more pathogenic, cause serious complications and even death. In addition, it reproduces rapidly.

Most often, it is coronaviruses that pass from animals to humans. They are so called, because in electron micrographs or on a slice they resemble a crown. This virus often causes a cold and is quite common among people.

At the initial stage, COVID-19 patients are believed to have become infected mainly from a zoonotic source at the seafood wholesale market in Hunan (China).

Intermediate - between a bat and a person - the host (hosts) of COVID-19 at the end of February 2020 has not yet been identified. In March 2020, three projects are actively underway in China, which should allow in the near future to obtain accurate information about the specifics of the origin of the outbreak. These projects include early investigations of cases of coronavirus infection in Wuhan during December 2019, separately in a sample from the Seafood Wholesale Market (Fish Market) in Hunan and other markets in this province, as well as studies on the detection of COVID-19 in various bats, reptiles and marine animals in the southern provinces of China.

The library of scientific works on coronavirus published on the website of the National Center for Biotechnology Information USA (NCBI) was discovered curious material published in the summer of 2019 by scientists from the South Korean University of Hallim, Shanghai Fudan University and the International Islamic University of Malaysia. Below is the most interesting fragment of the report:

"Over the past decades, we have seen several epidemics of respiratory infections from new viruses that originated from animals. Infections including SARS (SARS-CoV coronavirus), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV coronavirus) and swine flu have seriously threatened global health and the global economy. Given the misuse of antibiotics and mass international travel, the spread of carbapenemase-resistant Gram-negative bacteria raises serious concerns. These infections with epidemic and pandemic potential pose a huge threat to public health in the Asia-Pacific region and require a more effective prevention and control system, "says the scientific work" Emerging respiratory infections threaten the public health of the Asia-Pacific region. "

Scientists from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore at the same time noted in their work "Viruses in bats and the potential transmission of them to animals and humans," the presence of viruses capable of generating epidemics that were transmitted from bats. In particular, "we are talking about the SARS coronavirus, the Hendra and Nipah viruses. Also, bats can be the cause of the spread of the Ebola virus and the MERS coronavirus. They can generally be a repository of a large number of known and unknown viruses, many of which can be transmitted to humans. Knowledge of bat biology and immunology is limited, and scientists do not have a clear understanding of the major factors influencing virus transmission from bats. "

In January 2019, Singaporean scientists published the latest deployed experimental data on how bats can transmit viruses. Experts from the University of Hong Kong noticed that bats are the most effective distributors of coronaviruses, and the south of China is the ideal place from where a global pandemic can begin. In their work "Global Epidemiology of Bat Coronaviruses," published on the NCBI website in February 2019, you can read the following: "Bats are the second largest species of mammals and potential carriers of a wide variety of viruses. They are the only group of mammals capable of long flight, allowing them to spread viruses and increase the likelihood of interspecies transmission...

Before the SARS epidemic in the early 2000s, bats were not known as carriers of coronaviruses. Over the past 15 years, they have found more than 30 coronaviruses with secreted complete genomes, and much more if they do not have genomic sequences. "

In numerous works, Chinese scientists have pointed out that the greatest danger to humans is from wildlife markets and restaurants in South China where bats are sold or cooked. Their presence leads to interspecies transmission of coronaviruses and can provoke devastating global outbreaks of diseases, they say.

During international scientific cooperation in m2016-2017. in the southern provinces of China, 1,779 bats were caught for research and 32 of them were carriers of coronaviruses.

"Two new alpha coronavirus, the Rhinolophus sinicus HKU32 bat coronavirus (Rs-BatCoV HKU32) and the Tylonycteris robustula HKU33 bat coronavirus (Tr-BatCoV HKU33), have been found in Chinese horseshoe bats in Guangdong and large bamboo bats in Guizhou province," the University of Hong Kong virologists said. "New bat alfacoronaviruses confirm that Chinese horseshoe-nosed bats are undoubtedly the main potential repositories of new coronaviruses."

In the summer of 2019, scientists from the South Korean University of Hallim, Shanghai Fudan University and the International Islamic University of Malaysia published detailed studies on possible geolocations of the spread of epidemics caused by bat coronavirus in the human population. In particular, the following map is given in the work.

Geographical distribution of horseshoe-nosed bats that carry coronaviruses. Illustration: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The laboratory of special pathogens and biosafety of the Institute of Virology in the Chinese city of Wuhan is also actively studying coronaviruses and their transmission by bats. In 2019, based on research, its specialists published several dozen works on infection and its spread. And in one of the papers, for example, they reported the discovery of a new species of alfacoronovirus with unique genomic traits in Rhinolophus bats.

In their studies, Wuhan scientists pointed out that the source of the coronavirus is the southern provinces of China.

2019

Coronavirus COVID-19 recorded in the United States in December

On December 2 RIA Novosti , 2020, a retrospective study of blood samples collected from residents USA in December 2019 was reported, showing that some of them had COVID-19 even before China they announced the appearance of this virus. The article is published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Officials in China first reported mysterious cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, which turned out to be caused by the coronavirus, on December 31, 2019. In the United States, the first confirmed case of COVID-19 was reported on January 20, 2020 in a state resident who Washington recently arrived from. China

Researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analyzed more than 7,000 donated blood samples collected by the American Red Cross in nine states between December 13, 2019 and January 17, 2020.

Of these, 106 samples tested positive for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2: 39 in California, and 67 in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, Rhode Island and Wisconsin.

The authors conducted additional tests to exclude cross-reactivity of antibodies to other viruses and found that the detected antibodies are specific to SARS-CoV-2. Even taking into account possible false positive tests, it is safe to say that by early December the virus was already in the United States, scientists say.

The results suggest that COVID-19 may have already arrived in the United States by December 2019, earlier than previously thought, the authors of the article write.

Virologists believe that the presence of antibodies in the blood does not mean that a person is sick at the moment, but only that he had contact with the virus in the past.

The authors also note that the study design does not allow us to establish where and when the carriers of antibodies were infected with the coronavirus - perhaps these were people who recently returned from China. There is evidence that the virus circulated in China back in November 2019.

Retrospective studies conducted earlier in France and Italy also found antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in blood samples collected from residents of these countries in early December 2019.

Scientists plan to continue the study by contacting people whose blood showed the presence of antibodies to report information whether they traveled at the end of 2019 and experienced symptoms similar to COVID-19.

In addition, the authors hope to find samples of the tissues, saliva or blood of these people dating back to that time in order to check them for the presence of genetic material of the SARS-CoV-2 virus^[3].

Coronavirus COVID-19 recorded in Italy in November

In early December 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention USA (CDC) reported that coronavirus COVID-19 it was circulating Italy in as early as late November 2019. A new type of coronavirus was detected in a nasopharyngeal swab taken in early December 2019 in Milan from a four-year-old child. The results confirm the data of other studies, according to which the virus appeared To Europe much earlier than it began to be massively detected.

Tests of archival blood samples showed that one child from the Milan region developed severe acute respiratory syndrome caused by the coronavirus in early December 2019, that is, about three months before the first cases of COVID-19 were detected in the country. The first symptoms, cough and runny nose, the boy appeared on November 21, 2019, at the end of the same month he was brought to the ambulance department, and a few days later the child developed skin rashes, which doctors mistakenly associated with measles.

CDC: Coronavirus COVID-19 was in Italy back in September 2019

According to a report by researchers at Milan's Department of Biomedical Sciences, they conducted a retrospective analysis of samples taken from a patient during the disease. Then the boy was bled for measles virus testing, but the result was negative. A year later, an analysis for COVID-19 tested positive.

The new data support the results of other studies. According to these data, the outbreak of coronavirus infection in Italy began in late autumn 2019, and not at the end of February, as previously assumed, when the first cases of the disease were detected in the northern Italian city of Codogno. Another study published in June 2020 showed that the virus was present in the sewage systems of Milan and Turin back in December 2019.^[4]

Notes