![]() ![]() The virus may have been imported into the country in frozen food or by visiting sports teams, as some Chinese sources have claimed, or emerged in some other, as yet unknown way. Reports that workers at the Wuhan Institute needed hospital care in late 2019 may reflect nothing more sinister than seasonal illness. It may be coincidence that the outbreak emerged in a city containing the country’s leading coronavirus research centre. No evidence has been produced showing they were part of a bio-warfare programme.)īy themselves, of course, these facts prove nothing. (It is worth stressing that these experiments can be undertaken for a variety of reasons, including improving our ability to deal with zoonotic pandemics. The Wuhan Institute, on the other hand, is known to contain large collections of bat viruses and to have been the site of gain-of-function experiments. I have invoked it myself in this magazine.īut is this pandemic zoonotic? The bat caves where the closest related viruses to Sars-CoV-2 have been found are more than a thousand kilometres away from the Wuhan wet market where the virus was supposedly passed on to humans. Since there is a scientific consensus linking an increasing risk of pandemic with the destruction of animal habitats, the theory was reasonable. The dominant theory was that the pandemic was zoonotic in origin – in other words, it occurred as a result of animal-to-human transmission of the virus and then spread among humans. If there was a lab leak, the West was implicated. Partly this may have been because some of the funding for the Wuhan Institute came from an American non-profit organisation that distributed research grants from branches of the federal government. There was also resistance in the West, with prominent medical journals denouncing theories suggesting that Covid-19 might not have had a natural origin. Despite many signs of a cover-up – including the apparent removal from the internet of relevant papers by Chinese scientists, and the disappearance of citizen journalists – anyone who questioned the official Chinese narrative could expect to be branded a racist crank or a conspiracist. Things were quite different only a few months ago. ![]() Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.Uncountable human lives will be harder and shorter. Billions have endured damage to livelihood, disruption of schooling and harm to mental health. Millions more will die from unrelated medical conditions that have gone untreated. In contrast, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported in late May of this year that Covid had already killed as many as 3.5 million people. There is no agreed assessment of the human cost of Chernobyl, with estimates ranging from a few dozen deaths during or soon after the meltdown to more than a million lives being shortened or damaged by the longer-term effects of radiation since then and in coming years. A comparison with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster gives a sense of the scale of what is unfolding. ![]() In more recent times the widely respected journal has addressed other such risks, and there can be little doubt that if the Covid pandemic originated in a lab leak it is a man-made calamity larger than any other in history. The Bulletin was founded in 1945 by scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project and were concerned with existential threats to humanity posed by the atomic weapons they had created. In that event, a virologist working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris was quoted as saying, “Nobody could predict the trajectory.” In May 2021 an article in the same journal, “The origin of Covid: did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?”, suggested that the virus could have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology after being altered by “gain-of-function” experiments that increased its virulence and transmissibility. In August 2012 an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “The unacceptable risks of a man-made pandemic”, assessed the probability of a dangerous virus escaping from a laboratory as being around 80 per cent over a period of 12. ![]()
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