2023-04-19 17:40:37
RPublicans in the US Senate say SARS-CoV-2 is likely in a report released earlier this week titled Muddy Waters – The Origins of Covid-19 from the lab.
In it, they refer, among other things, to public Chinese reports about the Institute of Virology in Wuhan or the local disease control authority – in the former there were problems with biosecurity in autumn 2019. A first version of the report was published in November 2022 and was heavily criticized, for example with regard to possible translation errors from Chinese-language sources.
The approximately 300-page final version of the report that has now been published refers to many indications, which, however, contain no evidence of laboratory origin. According to media reports from May 2021, US intelligence circles had stated that employees at the virology institute fell ill in November 2019 and were therefore in the hospital – but it is unclear whether they actually contracted Covid-19.
In February of this year, CNN reported that the US Department of Energy assumed that research was being carried out on corona viruses at the Wuhan epidemic control agency at the time of the corona outbreak. Again, it remains unclear how similar these could have been to SARS-CoV-2.
Criticism from virologists
The report claims that a laboratory origin is also more likely against the background of estimates for the development of Chinese vaccines: This began in China at the end of 2019, for example by the virologist Wei Chen of the People’s Liberation Army Academy for Military Medical Sciences.
She submitted a patent in mid-March 2020: “Experts believe that Chen should have started her efforts to develop a vaccine by early December 2019 at the latest,” says the report – the genome of SARS-CoV-2 was only published in January 2020 . However, the report does not explain who these experts are and why they believe this.
The US Senator, gynecologist and Trump supporter Roger Marshall, on whose behalf the report has now been published, even went so far as to say that the virus very likely came from two laboratories without giving any further justification. In the report, the authors explain that both hypotheses – including those of a natural origin – have been objectively tested.
Although the publication also says that the question of origin cannot definitely be clarified at the moment – virologists who assume a natural origin clearly criticize it. “This makes the US Senate look like a laughing stock,” wrote University of Arizona evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey on Twitter. “The academic illiteracy in this report is in a league of its own.”
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