Thread by @Telegraph

🦠 Where did the Covid virus come from?

Did it mutate naturally or emerge from China's leading bat virus research lab?

Nicholas Wade explores the plausibility of both theories👇🧵

🔓 This article is currently free to read
telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness…

Right from the start, there were two plausible explanations for where the Covid virus might have come from.

1⃣The virus jumped naturally to people from some animal host

2⃣The virus escaped from a virus research lab

🦇"Yet for the past year mainstream media around the world have ignored this common sense possibility in favour of the scenario that the virus jumped naturally to people from some animal host" says Nicholas Wade

📌 However on May 14th, 18 leading scientists declared that lab escape was a viable theory and should be taken seriously in a letter in the journal 'Science'

🦠This marked a sudden shift in views that had been set 3 months earlier when the WHO sent a team to Beijing to explore the origin of the virus.

The team, which the Chinese government hand-picked, reported that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus had escaped from a lab

🇨🇳But this verdict was not quite the propaganda victory the Chinese may have hoped for.

What became clear in the wake of the WHO team’s conclusions was that the Chinese had been unable to provide a single scrap of evidence that the virus had emerged naturally.

🦇 When Chinese authorities announced that the first cases had occurred at the wet market in Wuhan, it was an easy assumption that the new virus had followed the same route as SARS1 to becoming a human pathogen

But the wet market connection was soon broken – Chinese researchers reported earlier cases in Wuhan with no link to the market.

Two reasonable scenarios of origin were on the table

Wuhan is home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a leading world centre for research on coronaviruses.

🦇Their programme is headed by Dr Zheng-li Shi, known as Bat Lady in China because of her intense interest in bat viruses

Dr Shi gathered coronaviruses from the bats that live in caves in southern China.

She took the spike protein genes from various viruses and inserted them into other viruses.

➡️This programme may have put her on track to create viruses far more infectious than she realised

🗣️“It is clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was systematically constructing novel chimeric coronaviruses and was assessing their ability to infect human cells and human-ACE2-expressing mice,” says Richard H. Ebright, a leading expert on biosafety

There is a long history of viruses escaping from even the best run laboratories.

The smallpox virus escaped three times from labs in England in the 1960s and 1970s, causing 80 cases and three deaths.

🧑‍🔬Dangerous viruses have leaked out of labs almost every year since

🦠However, there is no direct evidence for either the natural emergence or lab escape scenario.

In the absence of such evidence, Wade believes the best approach is to take some salient facts about the pandemic and ask which of the two scenarios provides the better explanation

Read the results of Nicholas Wade's test here 👇
telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness…