Thread by @TheSeeker268

Covid-19: would the hypothesis of a virus escaping from a laboratory be finally credible?

francetvinfo.fr/sante/maladie/…

"An epidemic cannot start naturally in Wuhan. It is not a coherent geographical origin. To explain it, humans have to intervene at one point or another."

Alexandre Hassanin, researcher at the National Museum of Natural History to franceinfo

"The work published for 15 yrs by this institute & in particular the lab of Shi Zhengli consisted in sampling viruses in wildlife in order to try to understand the mechanisms of crossing the species barrier to try to protect yourself from it,” Virologist Etienne Decroly notes.

"Certain techniques employed consist in cultivating the viruses, others in manipulating them to construct chimeric viruses which are easier to cross the species barrier....

..This type of manipulation raises the question of knowing whether there was no a possibility of escape from a laboratory of a sample which would have been collected in wildlife or which would have undergone this process."

Biologist Serge Morand does not rule out this possibility either. "It's a laboratory that is at a P3 level. It means that they do not necessarily do genetic manipulation there. It is a military laboratory a little further from the P4 level which does...

..But they do grow cells. You keep the virus alive in cells. You can grow animal cell cultures and pass them on human cell cultures. You could imagine that someone would accidentally become infected with this manipulation. It 'is possible. It wouldn't be the first time."

Alexandre Hassanin hatches another scenario which could have caused this cataclysm.

"When you seq the genome of a virus, you also seq a bit of that of its host. If you take the genome of these viruses and look at the geographic origin of the bats from which they are extracted..

..we realize that, for Sars-CoV-2, all the data currently available direct us towards Yunnan, southern China, even South-East Asia." However, he says, "members of the Wuhan laboratory were present until October 2019 in sample collection expeditions in Yunnan."

"If transmission is possible directly from bats to humans - which has not been proven - one of the hypotheses is to consider that one of the researchers was infected during this expedition, brought the disease with him to Wuhan and infected his relatives..

That would explain the emergence of the epidemic in Wuhan," concludes Alexandre Hassanin.

This scenario is not that far-fetched. In 2012, 6 miners working in a mine populated by bats in Yunnan developed a form of pneumonia of unknown viral origin and three of them died from it.

Shi Zhengli & her team were dispatched to investigate this cave rich in coronavirus. In 2013, she reported RaTG13, this bat virus is now considered to be the closest relative of Sars-CoV-2, Indian researchers report in the scientific journal Frontiers.

frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…