In another twist of ongoing studies on the origin of COVID-19, a foreign organization of researchers stumbled upon a new genetic curtain that had been published in a public clinical database and then removed.
As first reported in the Atlantic, in early March, Florence Debarre, an evolutionary biologist at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, conducted searches of the public GISAID database, where scientists download the genetic sequences of the pathogens they study. On the site, she found images of samples taken in January 2020 at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, shortly after the market closed due to fears that the COVID-19 virus would arrive from animals sold there.
Debarre, along with U. S. researchers, In the U. S. and Australia, they studied genetic sequences further and found that one could be traced back to a car at a stall one of the team’s scientists recalled visiting at the market in 2014, according to The New York Times. At the time, raccoon dogs were kept in a cart in which their cages were placed over cages housing birds, a setup that infectious disease experts know can herald the spread of viruses from one species to another. The pattern taken from the car in 2020 also contained SARS-CoV-2.
In February 2022, the Chinese government released effects summarizing swabs collected in 2020 from air, surfaces, and animals on the market—not all genetic sequences from those samples have been uploaded to GISAIDs. This report found no virus among the 18 animal species sampled, the virus is prevalent in environmental samples, such as air and surfaces, suggesting that other people harbor the virus and potentially spread it on the market.
Clinical and political communities have long been divided over whether SARS-CoV-2 originated in animals and spread to humans, or whether the virus was created, deliberately or accidentally, through researchers at the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology and then spread to animals. and other people around the world. In the most recent intelligence report on the subject, the U. S. Department of Energy has been briefed on the subject. The U. S. Department of Health analyzed speculation of a lab leak but classified its conclusion as “low confidence. “Four other U. S. government teams The U. S. Department of Homeland Intelligence and the U. S. National Intelligence CouncilThe U. S. government decided that the virus most likely originated in animals and spread to humans, but their tests were also low- or moderate-confidence, leaving open the question of how COVID-19 began.
The new samples Debarre discovered may help provide answers. But shortly after she and other scientists contacted the Chinese team that wrote the original report, the genetic sequences disappeared from GISAID.
At a press conference on March 17, Maria Van Kerkhove, COVID-19 technical officer at the World Health Organization, called on China to make the eliminated knowledge available to scientists. “The big challenge right now is that this knowledge exists and is not readily available to the foreign community,” he said. In its first investigation, the World Health Organization warned that the virus is most likely to spread from bats to humans, although the organization earlier this year scaled back the next level of its planned analysis, bringing difficulties in gaining access to information from Chinese fitness authorities. We want to take a look at all the mandatory information to compare each of those [assumptions] so we can say ‘it is possible that this would have happened, this possibly would not have happened. ‘””
Although the most recent genetic evidence has uncovered animal and viral genes in the same place, it still does not involve an inflamed animal or the genetic series of an animal showing evidence of infection with the virus. But the fact that the DNA of the raccoon dog and the virus The existence of genetic curtains in such close proximity means that it is imaginable that SARS-CoV-2 inflamed raccoon dogs and then spread to humans frequenting the market.
The images uncovered by Debarre suggest that there is more data from those initial tests on the market than the Chinese government has fully analyzed. This incompleteness leaves the mystery of the origin of COVID-19 unsolved.