Disputes of scientists around the origin of coronavirus: China has found a new argument

China has discovered two new coronaviruses lurking in bats. And state-funded virologists are putting them up as evidence that COVID-19 did not leak out of the lab.

Both pathogens contain the same genetic trait that is believed to make the pandemic-causing strain so contagious.

Before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in China at the end of 2019, not a single sarbecovirus (the family of viruses to which it belongs) even had a “furin cleavage site” found.

According to the Daily Mail, Western experts have argued that this oddity indicates that the pandemic is supposedly of artificial origin, challenging Beijing’s claims that it arose naturally.

However, the researchers, backed by the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said their discovery “deepens our understanding of the diversity of coronaviruses.” Sharing their findings in a scientific journal, they claim the discovery “convincingly” indicates that the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site “has arisen naturally.” They wrote that the discovery “provides a clue to the natural origin of the SARS-CoV-2 furin cleavage site.”

But, the Daily Mail notes, independent experts said the study could not draw that conclusion because the viruses found were actually not that closely related to COVID-19. Neither of the two viruses, known as CD35 and CD36, has so far been proven capable of infecting humans.

That prospect warrants “further exploration,” according to the researchers, who were indirectly funded by the authorities through China’s national research and development program.

Dr. Richard Ebright, a biologist at Rutgers University and a proponent of the lab leak, says the paper’s findings do nothing to disprove the possibility of a Covid leak from the research facility.

“The viruses reported in the article are not coronaviruses associated with SARS-CoV-2,” he told MailOnline. They are not even sarbecoviruses (a subgenus of viruses that includes viruses related to SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-Cov-2). The authors of the article classify them as hybecoviruses, placing the hybecovirus clade next to, but distinct from, the sarbecovirus clade.’

Therefore, he said that the article could not draw any conclusions about the unique cleavage site of COVID furin.

“SARS-CoV-2 is the only one of the hundreds of known sarbecoviruses that has a furin cleavage site,” says Dr. Ebright. somehow enough to disprove the idea that COVID originated in a lab.”

Professor François Balloux, an infectious disease expert at University College London, expressed the same doubts, writes the Daily Mail. “This is a hybecovirus that is completely unrelated to SARS-CoV-1/2,” he told MailOnline. “It has a furin cleavage site, but many coronaviruses (with the exception of sarbecoviruses) have it. This article tells us nothing about the origin of Covid “It just adds another type of coronavirus to the hundreds that have been described to date.”

The study itself describes that CD35 and CD36 are 54% genetically identical to Covid. This means it’s actually not all that related to Covid itself.

By comparison, a virus called RaTG13 obtained from bats in China in 2013 is 96% matched and has no furin cleavage site.

Scientists involved in the study analyzed the results of 112 bats caught in “abandoned caves” in Baoting County, south China’s Hainan Province, in March and April 2021. Of the collected bat samples, 7 (6.3%) tested positive for coronaviruses.

According to the Daily Mail, CD35 and CD36 were found in samples taken from large roundleaf bats, also known as the great Himalayan leaf-nosed bat.

The Chinese authors noted that because great roundleaf bats have a wide geographic distribution, they can be found in southern China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Malaysia, which means that CD35 can circulate widely.

The discovery was published by Virologica Sinica, a publishing house of the Chinese Society for Microbiology (CSM).

According to the Daily Mail, Virologica Sinica is edited by Dr. Shi Zhengli, an influential scientist known as China’s “batwoman” who works at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), considered in some circles to be the alleged origin of the Covid pandemic.

Fans of the study include the British zoologist whose organization has funded research at WIV and has been central to the debate about the origins of Covid.

Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, which has donated millions of US government dollars to fund experiments at a Chinese lab, tweeted about the study: “Happy Saturday! Here is a newly discovered bat β-CoV with a furin cleavage site in bats in Hainan, China.” .

He also cited the study’s conclusion: “..this study deepens our understanding of COV diversity and provides a clue to understanding the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2 FCS.”

Dr. Daszak has repeatedly dismissed any suggestion that experiments in the lab could have led to Covid.

An expert on zoonoses, the spread of viruses from animals to humans, has become one of the central and controversial figures at the center of the debate about the origins of Covid. He was accused of orchestrating a behind-the-scenes “scare” campaign to divert blame for Covid from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It was that he convinced 26 other scientists to sign a letter he wrote to the scientific journal The Lancet, arguing that the coronavirus could only have a natural origin, and suggestions to the contrary give rise to “fear, rumors and prejudice.” The letter was so influential that it caused most experts to refuse to even consider the possibility that the virus could have been man-made.

In January 2021, Dr. Daszak joined the World Health Organization (WHO) team sent to Wuhan to investigate the origin of the virus. The team’s report, published in March 2021, concluded that it was “highly unlikely” that the virus originated in a laboratory. But he came under fire after it was revealed he had a working relationship with virologist Dr Shi Zhengli, nicknamed “Bat Woman”.

The lab leak theory, once dismissed as an outright conspiracy, has been gaining ground ever since the virus first caused a global pandemic.

Back in 2020, the prevailing view, shared by the world’s leading experts, was that Covid naturally jumped from animals infected with the bat coronavirus to humans. But the consensus about how the pandemic began three years ago has slowly begun to change. FBI Director Christopher Wray said in February that the virus “most likely” originated from an incident at a lab in Wuhan.

However, most experts argue that Covid most likely arose naturally, passing from animals to humans – what is known as a zoonosis. Such theories mostly pointed to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where numerous species of live animals were kept and sold, as a potential site where such an infection could occur.

And in February 2021, the World Health Organization’s investigation into the origins of Covid found it “highly unlikely” to leak the virus from a lab. But plans for a second phase of the investigation, including an audit of laboratories in the Wuhan area, have been rejected by the Chinese government.

No concrete evidence to support either argument has ever been found, leading experts to fear that the truth about Covid’s origins will never be revealed.

Beyond simply establishing historical fact, experts also want to find out how Covid originated to help prevent other similar pathogens from becoming pandemics in the future.