Not everyone was out celebrating though. A handful of Asian epidemiologists had identified a potential viral pandemic in the making and their attention was firmly focused on China. As new year’s day unfolded, frantic emails were being exchanged between Taiwanese epidemiologists based in Asia, the WHO, and their colleagues in the West, describing worrying pneumonia of unknown origin that was rapidly getting out of hand in a city in China. Human to human transmission was strongly suspected and these experts recognized the danger signals. Many harbored well-founded concerns of an impending disaster and decided to yell, “Houston, we have a problem”. 

Houston, or in this instance the World Health Organization (WHO) dragged their feet. We may never know the real chain of events that unfolded in the WHO offices between the receipt of those first Taiwanese emails sounding the alarm in early January and the initial acknowledgment and warning they issued in late January, directed at the global community. Whatever the politics, it was too little, too late.

The biggest threat that was to emerge over December 2019 and January 2020 wasn’t Wuhan itself or the virus. Wuhan is a transportation hub of China, a densely populated city with a population of more than 14 million in 2019. Enter the Wuhan Tianhe International Airport (IATA: WUH, ICAO), a large airport on the outskirts of Wuhan. Tianhe is an international airport and serves the area of Hubei, China. Most importantly, this airport serves non-stop passenger flights to 103 destinations in 8 countries and 92 domestic flights inside China.

Had the coronavirus outbreak occurred elsewhere, not in close proximity to an international airport, we wouldn’t, in all likelihood, be having this discussion right now. Mankind would have dodged another viral bullet. Or would we?

Having this international airport located at the center of a potential pandemic outbreak with confirmed cases of human to human transmission shouldn’t just have sounded a warning bell, it should have set off every siren the medical world possessed.

Instead, the world was offered a watered-down warning, written in typical medical parlance, language we call medi-speak, that avoids any specifics and remains as vague as possible to allow for wiggle room. The WHO, who was called on seriously, in a way their services had never been called on before, failed miserably to fulfill their basic mandate to humanity. They failed to warn us and they failed to protect us. 

Vague, non-specific, and indecisive warnings and advisories were issued. In the early weeks of January 2020, as the world tried to figure out what the WHO was actually saying, the coronavirus quietly and unobtrusively did what viruses do best. It continued to spread, making its way to almost every corner of the globe, carried invisibly across borders by its hosts. Us.

Wuhan earns its place in pandemic history. or does it?

Wuhan had just cemented its place in pandemic history and rumors quickly began circulating online that sought to explain the origins of the virus in various ways. Experts and virologists initially pointed to the wet markets in Wuhan, specifically the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, as the most likely source of infection. It didn’t take long for the wheels to come off this theory, as only environmental contamination was found at the market. Horseshoe bats breathed a cumulative sigh of relief and then the blame game kicked off, big time.

China blamed America for introducing the virus to Wuhan during the October 2019 World Military Games. Americans responded by developing a promoting their own crazed theories, the favored one suggesting that the new novel coronavirus was in actual fact a Chinese manufactured pathogen, created in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) lab in China relatively close (25 to 35 kilometers [15 to 22 miles]) to the Wuhan live-animal market at the epicenter of China’s outbreak. The only common thread shared by all the theories, crazed or otherwise, that emerged as the coronavirus continued to spread in early 2020 was this one single and apparently immutable fact. Wuhan was ground zero.

While we were all at odds to decide exactly how it had happened, we were all certain of one fact,. Wuhan was the source of SARS-CoV2. 

But was it?

Research begins to paint another picture

On the 13th of January, 2020, South Cina Morning Post confirmed Thailand had recorded the first case of coronavirus outside of China, a Chinese individual, not attached to the Huanan Seafood market. The woman, 61, was identified as a Chinese tourist from the city in central Hubei province. She received treatment in a hospital in Nonthaburi near Bangkok, where she was first admitted on January 8. This appeared to be the first known publicly recorded case of the virus escaping China’s borders. Many followed in short succession.

Data, in the first year of the pandemic, was dealt with in real-time as scientists battled to combat the virus. Almost without exception, data were drawn from patients infected with the coronavirus, post-January 2020. We had no reason or driving motivation to examine cases that predated this or to even consider the quesion. We were overwhelmed with too much real-time information flowing from pandemic hotspots across the globe to bother with 2019.

Scientists and researchers are, however, by nature, inquisitive creatures and it was only a question of time before people started to ask questions. One of these was a simple, but controversial one. What if the coronavirus had been around for a lot longer than we originally surmised? To confirm the presence of the virus in the population you need serological samples taken from a broad swathe of people, Samples that you can easily test for markers associated with the coronavirus. 

Italy and France were in possession of just such samples and exhibited sufficient scientific curiosity to pursue the question.

Was the Genie already out of the bottle?

By January of 2020, according to emerging data, the coronavirus had already made its way around the globe. Now, research in the West indicates confirmed infections in Europe that predate the Wuhan outbreak by months. Patients in Italy and France had contracted the virus as early as September, October, and November of 2019. France provides an interesting perspective on this, with blood samples taken from pneumonia patients in December of 2020. One of the cases was identified as being Covid. The particulars of this case and the timing are of interest.

Paris, France

The Paris-based hospital collected samples from 24 patients (over December 2019 and January 2020) presenting with pneumonia. to detect influenza using PCR tests, the same genetic screening process used to detect the presence of the novel coronavirus in patients infected at the time the sample is collected. One was identified as being Covid positive. 

The patient, a man, had been admitted on the 27th of November and had not traveled to China. The man’s wife worked alongside a Sushi stand, close to colleagues of Chinese origin and although the man had infected both his children, the wife remained asymptomatic. Yves Cohen, head of resuscitation at the Avicenne and Jean Verdier hospitals in the northern suburbs of Paris, where the patient was hospitalized was quoted at the time in an interview.

“Of the 24, we had one who was positive for COVID-19 on Dec. 27. Each sample was retested several times to ensure there were no errors.”

It may be easy to dismiss this article and the hospital’s findings as an anomaly perhaps attributable to cross-contamination of samples. It happens as we’re far from perfect. The desire to pinpoint China as the source of the epidemic has also been overwhelming and any evidence to the contrary tends to be dismissed out of hand. 

An article published in The French magazine, The Connexion, highlights the findings of another French study. National health research body Inserm said:

 “The first identified cases of COVID-19 were detected on December 8, 2019, in Wuhan, China; and the first documented case in Europe was reported retrospectively in France… on December 27”.

But, it added, new research “suggests early circulation of SARS-CoV-2 in Europe” going back to at least November 2019 in France, and even earlier in Italy. You can read the paper which highlights later retesting from the CONSTANCE cohort here. It validates findings that suggest infections of coronavirus in France as early as November of 2019. According to the original article;

In the study, scientists analysed 9,144 blood samples taken from a pool of 200,000 male and female adult participants, living in all regions of mainland France. The samples had been collected between November 4, 2019, and March 16, 2020. They were first analysed using a rapid Elisa test to detect Covid-19 antibodies and the virus was found in 353 participants.

To discount false positives, a second highly specific test was then done on these samples. This showed 13 of the samples taken between November 5, 2019 and January 30, 2020 came back “SN positive” meaning the Covid-19 virus had been detected.

Professor Fabrice Carrat, director of the study, told Le Monde:

“These results suggest that as early as November and December of 2019, the rate of contamination among people in France was already around one case per 1,000 people. We seem to have found cases sporadically, all over the country.”

What really caught our eye though was a newer article that examined blood samples taken from a cancer cohort in late 2019 in Italy.

Italy sees France and raises the stakes

Entitled “Unexpected detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the pre-pandemic period in Italy,” the paper was published in November of 2020. You can read the entire paper by following the link. We’ll provide a basic overview below.

First, a little context. The first laboratory-confirmed Italian COVID-19 case was identified in Lombardy on February 20, 2020, in a 38-year-old man who had no history of possible contacts with positive cases in Italy or abroad. Within a few days, additional cases of COVID-19 and critically ill patients were recorded in the surrounding area. Soon several cases were identified in other Italian regions, mostly in the northern area. Lockdowns were first applied in 2 critical areas of Lombardy and Veneto and were rapidly enforced regionally and nationwide starting on March 8.

Italy’s first two known cases of COVID-19 disease were recorded on January 30, 2020, when two tourists from China tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 in Rome.

On the basis of the first case identification, it was hypothesized that the virus had been circulating in Italy since January 2020. However, the rapid spread, the large number of patients requiring hospital admission and treatment in intensive care units, as well as the duration of the pandemic suggest that the arrival of the virus and its circulation in Italy in a less symptomatic form could be anticipated by several months.

What the authors of the paper needed was a serological sample to test from earlier in 2019. They were in luck. Their eventual cohort was a population enrolled from September 2019 to March 2020 through the SMILE trial (Screening and Multiple Intervention on Lung Epidemics; ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03654105), a prospective lung cancer screening study using low-dose computed tomography and blood biomarkers. They had their samples and set about testing them. What they found verified their suspicions.

The first surge of positive cases was identified in September–October 2019, a full three months before the Wuhan cluster. Evaluation of anti–SARS-CoV-2 functional NAbs identified positive samples in CPE-based microneutralization tests already collected in October 2019. Given the temporal delay between infection and antibody synthesis, these results indicate that the virus circulated in Italy well before the detection of the declared index patient in February 2020. In addition, most of the first antibody-positive individuals lived in regions where the pandemic started.

Reviving an old conspiracy

It’s time to wheel out one of the rumor mill’s favorite conspiracies, the World Military Games. We’re left with little choice at this point as the confirmed presence of the SARS-CoV2 virus in Europe in September of 2019 casts serious doubt on Wuhan being the center of origin. As insufficient data exists at this stage, hopefully, a situation that will be remedied in the coming months as we attempt to track down the real ground zero for the virus, we are going to make a few reasonably safe assumptions.

1. Italy and France were not the only countries infected with the novel coronavirus in late 2019. Logic dictates that if it was present in two large and well-traveled European populations, that it had already spread globally as early as September or October of 2019.
2. Testing has only been performed retroactively on samples collected from September of 2020. It is very likely that the presence of the SARS-CoV2 virus in our populations may predate this period by months,escaping detection as it gradually evolved to develop its current strains.
3. Wuhan, was almost certainly not the point of origin, merely the first population to develop an infectious cluster of the mutated virus, establishing a pattern soon to be repeated across the globe.

All of which brings us back to the question of the World Military Games, officially known as the 7th CISM Military World Games. Almost every country was in attendance at the event hosted in Wuhan in October of 2019. Stretching from the 18th to the 27th of October, it was the largest military sports event ever to be held in China, with nearly 10,000 athletes from over 100 countries competing in 27 sports.

Many of the athletes complained of Covid like symptoms during their stay in Wuhan, among them French athlete Élodie Clouvel, who speculated that an illness she and her fellow athlete, Valentin Belaud experienced, may have been COVID-19. Around 230,000 volunteers were recruited for the event and with so many potential global carriers of the virus assembled together, this event may very well have served as the catalyst for the subsequent outbreak seen in Wuhan in December of 2019.

Given what we know and with the promise of emerging data from research currently underway, every single nation on the planet is a suspect. Any could potentially have served as the source of origin for the SARS-CoV2 virus. We will have absolutely no way of determining this until further research is done. We do however know enough now to be able to safely say that Wuhan is looking less and less likely by the day. Its population of 14 million merely served as the first large petri dish for the virus’s more ambitious plans.

Keep in mind that one of the major sources of the outbreak of the Great Flu was a military encampment in the US. Poor hygiene in the camp and proximity to animals, in particular waterfowl and swine, had been suggested as the possible catalyst for animal-to-human transition in the 1918 pandemic. 

The longer we continue to allow massive encampments of impoverished, homeless seas of humanity to persist globally, we encourage the opportunity for new viral crossover events. Refugee and migrant camps aren’t merely an afront to a civilized world, they may also spell our end. These camp cities house hundreds of thousands of people in squalid conditions with no sanitation or freshwater. It is a recipe for future disasters.

So where does that leave us?

Aah, the million-dollar question. This new data is potentially far more worrying than any version of scaremongering the world could dream up over Wuhan. What it tells us is this.

We have no defense mechanisms that can function effectively against new, highly infectious, emergent viral strains and we may never develop any. These data tell us that new viral strains can move about freely in our populations, undetected for extended periods, offering the virus the time and opportunity needed to hone its attack. To mutate. Our responses will always be too little, too late. It is the nature of the combatant we are engaged with.

Viruses predate man and they will most certainly outlive us. In our self-induced technological arrogance, we assume mastery of everything we survey. The actual truth is far removed from this fictional view of our reality. We are as much a part of nature as any other organism on the planet and our species poses a very real threat to the ecosystem we inhabit. Nature has a way of ensuring balance and we lose sight of this at our own peril.

While you digest that you may consider issuing an apology to your Chinese friends. They are merely victims of an unpleasant pandemic, affected in exactly the same way we’ve all been.

The post Wuhan Was Not the Source of the Coronavirus, According to Research appeared first on Medika Life.

Two days ago, the professor who teaches at the University of Hamburg, released a 100-page report that he personally prepared on the alleged origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In the report he makes the following claims, claims that he openly states are not based on scientific certainty, but rather deductive logic and circumstantial evidence. 

According to Prof. Wiesendanger and the 100-page report (available here on Research Gate) he has released, he has come to the following conclusion.

“both the number and quality of the circumstantial evidence point to a laboratory accident at the virological institute in the city of Wuhan as the cause of the current pandemic.”

He bases this claim on the following statements. (the statements below are reproduced from swprs.org)

No intermediate host animal has been identified that could have facilitated the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 pathogens from bats to humans. ergo, the zoonotic theory as a possible explanation for the pandemic has no sound scientific basis.

The SARS-CoV-2 viruses possess special cell receptor binding domains combined with a special (furin) cleavage site of the coronavirus spike protein. Both properties together were previously unknown in coronaviruses and indicate a non-natural origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen.

Bats were not offered for sale at the suspected fish market in the center of Wuhan city. However, the Wuhan City Virological Institute has one of the world’s largest collections of bat pathogens, which originated from distant caves in southern Chinese provinces. It is extremely unlikely that bats from this distance of nearly 2,000 km would have naturally made their way to Wuhan, only to cause a global pandemic in close proximity to this virological institute.

A research group at the Wuhan City Virological Institute has been genetically manipulating coronaviruses for many years with the goal of making them more contagious, dangerous, and deadly to humans. This has been documented in the scientific literature by numerous publications.

Significant safety deficiencies existed at the Wuhan City Virological Institute even before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, which have been documented.

There are numerous direct references to a laboratory origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen. For example, a young female scientist at the virology institute in Wuhan is believed to have been the first to become infected. There are also numerous indications that as early as October 2019, the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen spread from the virological institute to the city of Wuhan and beyond. Furthermore, there are indications that the virological institute was investigated by the Chinese authorities in the first half of October 2019.

Taken on their own, these claims would be easy to dismiss, but bundled together they make a very convincing case for pointing to the laboratory in Wuhan as the most likely source of the outbreak. It’s a very serious allegation with far-reaching implications if it is true and it, therefore, warrants serious attention.

As to Motivation

Why would a respected nanotechnology expert with an incredibly long and illustrious career suddenly branch out into a field he openly admits to having no experience in? Why would he risk his career by publishing a controversial report that is clearly not evidence-based on a hugely controversial topic he knows nothing about? It’s the first and most obvious question and one that we cannot answer with certainty, but we can speculate.

There has been growing concern in medical and scientific circles about “Gain-of-Function (GOF)” research. Essentially, this research focuses on weaponizing viruses or exploiting the virus to make it more lethal to its human hosts. In scientific terms, the research seeks to increase the pathogenicity of a virus. There are elements within the scientific community who are almost militant in their desperation to stop this type of research and with good reason.

Arguably, being able to pin a pandemic on this type of research would stop it in its tracks, but to achieve that you would need to conclusively prove that the Wuhan laboratory was engaged in GOF research, that they had access to a coronavirus, that they were able to successfully increase its pathogenicity, and finally, that they accidentally or otherwise, released the virus into the human population.

That’s a tall order, particularly after the WHO inspectors on the ground in China released a statement just ten days ago in which they urged scientists to dismiss theories about a laboratory as the origin, stating the possibility was ‘extremely unlikely’. Our professor has however apparently been working on his report for over a year, so the timing of the WHO advisory may simply have been an unfortunate coincidence.

Let’s look now to the claims made, and examine them individually.

Fact or Fallacy

‘the zoonotic theory as a possible explanation for the pandemic has no sound scientific basis.’

We won’t waste much time on this. Suggesting that simply because an agent has not yet been located for the transmission, that one does not exist, is simply flawed logic. The theory of animal to human transmission does have precedence and that is why it must be explored to its conclusion. We are a long way from that point.

a special (furin) cleavage site of the coronavirus spike protein indicates a non-natural origin of the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen

Again, flawed logic, from someone who should know not to confuse correlation with causation. Simply because no previous instance exists doesn’t imply the virus was manufactured by humans, nor does this allow us to make any other inferences. You could argue aliens developed it, based on the same logic, so sorry, but no. Strike 2.

It is extremely unlikely that bats from this distance of nearly 2,000 km would have naturally made their way to Wuhan

In 2012 a coronavirus was discovered in bats living in a mine in Mojiang in China, some 1200 km’s (not 2000 as claimed) from Wuhan. Labeled RaTG13 by scientists, the virus was the closest know version of a coronavirus to be discovered in animals. It wasn’t, and still isn’t, the SAR-CoV2 virus. We still haven’t found the carrier, if it originated in animals, as is currently suspected by the majority of scientists.

WHO scientists have also highlighted in their recent report that contact between bats and people in the Wuhan area is uncommon.

The fact this is the currently preferred theory doesn’t preclude all others and science has been known to be wrong before, ask Galileo. So while we can agree that bats may be ruled out at a later date, it still doesn’t point conclusively to the laboratory as the source. It merely rules out bats as the likely source.

The Wuhan City Virological Institute has been genetically manipulating coronaviruses for many years with the goal of making them more contagious, dangerous, and deadly to humans

It’s interesting that the publication lists no links to the ‘numerous reports documented in the medical literature that it refers to. The Wuhan Institute of Virology did in fact have access to the coronavirus and it would have engaged in research on the virus. Given the purpose behind the Institute, it would be foolish to claim otherwise and the Institute has never denied possession of the coronavirus (not the SARS-CoV2 strain). 

They have however repeatedly insisted that there were no safety lapses that could have resulted in any virus escaping from the laboratory. The institute is home to the China Center for Virus Culture Collection, the largest virus bank in Asia and which preserves more than 1,500 strains, according to its website.

Are there occasional safety issues at the laboratory? Probably, but it is unlikely they occur in the P4 wing of the institute. Safety protocols are extremely high and adhered to meticulously in areas where many of the highly lethal viruses scientists are working with, are potentially fatal if contracted. These institutes are also subject to international oversight and there is a regular presence of foreign scientists at this, and other similar institutes.

The takeaway

There is no substance to any of the professors claims and it is our opinion that he should retract his conjectural report.

Scientists are highly skeptical of Dr. Roland Wiesendanger’s, and he openly admitted to ZDF, a German newspaper, that the report was not based on science, but merely designed to spark public debate. While no one can, at this point, claim with complete certainty that the laboratory in Wuhan was not involved in the origins of the pandemic, the opposite is equally true, and to engage in this kind of false news is professionally disingenuous and suggest alternate motives.

We’d like to suggest to the professor, that abusing scientific publications for the purposes of “sparking public debate” is in fact highly questionable. We would further argue that accusing a foreign power and your foreign compatriots of unleashing a pandemic they “engineered” is both irresponsible and dangerous, particularly if your allegations are based on circumstantial evidence. Allegations, that are, in effect, baseless.

We were under the impression the professor dealt with science and evidence-based conclusions. Clearly, this is no longer the case. May we respectfully remind him, that if he continues to attempt to emulate Sherlock Holmes, he has not yet exhausted the impossible, and so, cannot begin to claim the improbable. His current course of action does a disservice to both science and his profession and will serve only as fuel for future conspiracy theories.

Not happy with our simplistic public-facing breakdown. Let’s see what an expert in Covid research says on the topic. A Medika Life author and SARS-CoV2 researcher, Julian Willett, MD adds his voice.

Dr. Roland Wiesendanger is a PhD physicist and lacks medical qualifications. His personal research is not medical related (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=roland+wiesendanger). Expert opinions on topics tend to be from those who have extensive experience in a given discipline. His claims make being an expert even more important (especially firm scientific evidence is further required). The WHO and its health team, made up of physicians, physician-scientists, and scientists all specializing in medical topics and often virology have deemed that it is extremely unlikely that the virus came from a lab.

I personally am a physician-scientist investigating COVID-19 genetics, for my Ph.D., both the virus’s genetics and the human genetics associated with the virus. I trust the WHO’s findings and agree with the responses to Dr. Wiesendanger’s points by the author of this article. There are already increased hate crimes done against those of Asian ancestry due to it publicly arising first in Asia. Such a work by Dr. Wiesendanger utilizing baseless claims only provides fuel to such hate.

The post Fact-Checking Prof. Roland Wiesendanger Covid Claims About Wuhan Laboratory appeared first on Medika Life.