Tag Archives: Wuhan

India Claims SARS-CoV-2 Came From Lab

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In its first official statement about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the Indian government, in the person of Union minister Nitin Gadkari, has called the virus man-made. Gadkari is both the Minister for Road Transport & Highways of India and the Minister of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises He made the claim in an interview with NDTV on May 13, 2020.

Although  the larger number of scientists making public statements claim that SARSCoV-2 is natural, there are several important exceptions. Those exceptions warrant revisiting now that the Chinese government has retracted its original narrative of how the disease originated and is trying to  regulate investigation into that topic.

The first charges of a synthetic virus origin began with a non peer-reviewed preprint paper, “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp 120 and Gag,” written by a group of Indian scientists from IIT, Delhi.

The paper claimed that the virus might have been engineered using the AIDS virus, the HIV virus. Published on January 31 on preprint server bioRxiv, the paper was withdrawn on Feb 2, after vociferous  criticism from a number of scientists around the world.

China Retracts Wuhan Wet-Market Origin of Virus

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From The Business-Standard, May 27, 2020:

‘Scientists collected viral genome samples from 326 patients in Shanghai between January 20 and February 25. They identified two major clades, both of which included cases diagnosed in early December 2019. The scientists noticed that genomes of six patients with contact history related to the Huanan seafood market fell into one kind of clade while those of three other patients diagnosed in the same period but without exposure to the market clustered into the other clade, suggesting multiple origins of transmission in Shanghai.’

Earlier the Chinese study into the origin of the novel coronavirus have suggested that the virus, which caused havoc on the globe, had its origin in the famous Huanan seafood market in Wuhan.”

This news doesn’t mean necessarily refute the theory that the virus was spread from the 7th World Military Games at Wuhan in October 2019. It’s still quite within the range of probability that the Games were the point of dissemination of the virus in China and some clades of the virus stayed in Wuhan, while others were transported to Shanghai.

But it also doesn’t mean that the US was the country behind the dissemination. It could also have been China itself…or some other hitherto unsuspected nation.

Frankly, we just don’t have enough data to do more than speculate.