365NEWSX
365NEWSX
Subscribe

Welcome

Scientists battle over the ultimate origin story: Where did the coronavirus come from? - The Washington Post

Scientists battle over the ultimate origin story: Where did the coronavirus come from? - The Washington Post

Scientists battle over the ultimate origin story: Where did the coronavirus come from? - The Washington Post
Jun 20, 2021 3 mins, 43 secs

But he had co-signed a letter to the Lancet in February 2020 saying SARS-CoV-2 was not a bioengineered virus and condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”.

It is not a theory so much as a constellation of scenarios that imagine how the virus may have emanated from a laboratory in China, ranging from the accidental to the sinister.

It dominates news coverage and public discussion of the origin of the pandemic, shoving aside the natural zoonosis hypothesis — which asserts that, like so many previous infectious pathogens, the novel coronavirus most likely jumped unassisted into the human population from a still-unidentified animal host.

Some virologists, including Perlman, have said they can’t rule out some kind of unintentional laboratory accident.

The new openness to such scenarios culminated last month when the journal Science published a letter from 18 prominent scientists calling for a more robust probe of the virus’s origin and criticizing a World Health Organization report that called a lab leak “extremely unlikely.”.

And some people are proclaiming certainties about the origin of the virus despite having limited knowledge or expertise, she said.

“[M]isinformation, unsubstantiated claims, and personal attacks on scientists surrounding the different theories of how the virus emerged are unacceptable, and are sowing public confusion and risk undermining the public’s trust in science and scientists, including those still leading efforts to bring the pandemic under control,” the letter said.

Fauci has managed to serve seven presidents by avoiding political quagmires, but in recent weeks he has been excoriated in the right-wing news media and by some prominent Republican officials for his institute’s past funding of virus research at the Wuhan lab.

Chinese scientists deny they had SARS-CoV-2 or its immediate ancestor in-house.

The leak conjectures are fashioned around unknowns, missing information, inconsistent statements by scientists and a lack of transparency among Chinese officials.

But scientists who support a natural origin have yawning gaps in their own story.

Collins and Fauci have called for Chinese scientists to open their records to inspection.

Scientists adhering to the natural origin hypothesis are unlikely to embrace a rival hypothesis that requires, as a fundamental assumption, an impenetrable wall of deceit.

Critics say the WHO investigators who delivered a report on the virus origin did only a cursory investigation of the institute.

Daszak also signed the 2020 Lancet letter denouncing conspiracy theories about a lab origin.

The letter to the journal Science, in particular, helped put the imprimatur of mainstream science on an idea previously marginalized as a conspiracy theory.

Relman, one of the organizers of the letter to Science, said the political climate last year made many scientists hesitant to express openness to the lab-leak idea.

Relman said two scientists who were asked to sign the letter to Science expressed concern that it could contribute to anti-Asian bigotry.

Relman noted that the letter concluded with an affirmation of support for Chinese scientists fighting the pandemic.

Relman said he goes back and forth on whether a natural or laboratory origin of SARS-CoV-2 is more likely.

He is open to the possibility that Chinese officials haven’t been forthcoming about their laboratory experiments.

“It seems more likely that either the virus was grown unknowingly and produced an asymptomatic infection, and none of that was recognized, or a laboratory worker infected themselves unknowingly during collection of samples from a natural viral reservoir, like a cave with bats,” Relman said.

“Somewhere it’s out there, and there’s a ton of it, and we just haven’t flipped over enough stones yet,” said Benjamin Neuman, a virologist at Texas A&M University who, like Perlman, was one of the scientists who gave SARS-CoV-2 its name in early 2020.

Garry Jr., a Tulane University virologist who co-authored an influential Nature Medicine paper in March 2020 saying SARS-CoV-2 was not engineered, is similarly emphatic that a natural origin outside of a lab remains most likely.

He said the virus has genetic features that “scream” natural evolution.

Lipkin said it’s possible that the Wuhan scientists had the coronavirus in-house and simply didn’t realize it?

That raises the possibility of sloppy handling of a dangerous virus, he said.

An accidental infection in a lab with an undocumented virus would be nearly impossible to distinguish from one that occurred outside the lab, he said

“We may never know where this thing came from,” Lipkin said

That’s why we have such extensive discussions and, in some cases, vituperative discussions,” Perlman said

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

RECENT NEWS

SUBSCRIBE

Get monthly updates and free resources.

CONNECT WITH US

© Copyright 2024 365NEWSX - All RIGHTS RESERVED