Covid: US vs China dispute and origin of Sars-CoV-2 – 04/22/2023 – Marcelo Leite

Judging by the content that appears in the national enlightened bubble, the enigma of the origin of Sars-CoV-2 was considered solved. The perception is wrong, because it is still not known how the virus that killed 7 million people emerged, 10% of them in Brazil alone, which has less than 3% of the world’s population.

The apparent solution to the viral riddle would have come with the publication of DNA sequences from the Huanan market, in the city of Wuhan, the starting point of the pandemic: the much sought after vector that would have infected humans was a raccoon dog sold at the fair. It wasn’t that simple, of course.

The DNA found adds some circumstantial support to the hypothesis that an animal has contaminated vendors or customers at the market, true, but it is far from providing definitive proof. By itself, the evidence does not rule out that Sars-CoV-2 emerged about 10 km away, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (IVW).

The 172 genetic samples in question were collected from the market in January 2020. That is, about a month after the first cases of Covid appeared in the city, an outbreak initially hushed up by authorities. Of the samples obtained, 60 tested positive for Sars-CoV-2.

Mixed with the positive samples were also stretches of DNA identified in animals susceptible to infection by this family of viruses, such as the raccoon dog. This suggests, but does not prove, that animals contaminated by Sars-CoV-2 were for sale there, as only the presence of the virus in animal tissue would represent strong evidence of this.

Alice Hughes, from the University of Hong Kong, told Nature magazine (where the DNA data came from) that the samples contained not only genetic material from raccoon dogs, but also from pandas, moles and chimpanzees. The biologist considers that killing pandas is punishable by death in China, and they certainly weren’t sold at the Wuhan fair.

There may well have been contamination of the samples in the laboratories that analyzed them. Or else the genetic analysis was deficient. The data cannot be trusted much, not even as an indirect indication of contamination from raccoon dogs, even less that they were the initial vectors of the pandemic.

For those who are convinced that the hypothesis of laboratory escape from IVW is hopeless, however, the new evidence with DNA, tenuous as it may be, appears as more evidence to corroborate the favored explanation (market). This is what is called confirmation bias.

Everything indicates that, in Brazil, the hypothesis of origin in the market became established among admirers of science because the alternative (laboratory exhaust) was preferred by two Beelzebubs, Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump. To consider the institute as a source of the pandemic would be equivalent to subscribing to imperialist, anti-Chinese, even racist conspiracy theories.

In the United States, the scenario is somewhat different. He didn’t change much even with Trump’s defeat, because even under Joe Biden, China remains the main geopolitical opponent, alongside Russia.

American government bodies, parliamentarians and press vehicles keep the laboratory thesis alive there. It fits well with the strategic interests of the power that is losing ground in the world. The evidence is scarce, in fact, but one should not forget that the control of information by the Chinese dictatorship does not contribute to clarifying anything, only to confuse.

It is astonishing, in terms of a global health threat, that the DNA data was only published three years after the start of the pandemic. How much more information is the Chinese government hiding in the meantime?

Cold War 2.0 has more than one side, remember. Researchers and enlightened people, friends of science and objectivity, should not align themselves with any of them. In a war, as the commonplace says, the first victim is always the truth.

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