Explainer: China’s Mojiang mine and its role in the origins of COVID-19 https://t.co/mWDMYdp4WG by @DavidStanway pic.twitter.com/xbkVInYlmQ
— Reuters (@Reuters) June 9, 2021
If COVID-19 did come from a ‘lab leak’ — no more than a 15% probability, IMO — 99% odds it was an accidental-exposure failure, not an OMG the ChiComs are plotting to kill us all horror-movie scenario:
Top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has urged China to release information about six labourers who fell ill after working in a mine in Yunnan province in 2012, and are now seen as a key part of efforts to find the origins of COVID-19.
The workers, ages 30 to 63, were scrubbing a copper seam clean of bat faeces in April 2012. Weeks later, they were admitted to a hospital in the provincial capital of Kunming with persistent coughs, fevers, head and chest pains and breathing difficulties. Three eventually died…
According to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli, China’s top bat coronavirus researcher, the workers’ pneumonia-like symptoms were caused by a fungal infection. Shi and her team also said in research published last November that they had retested 13 serum samples from four of the patients and found no sign they had been infected with SARS-CoV-2…
From 2012 to 2015, WIV researchers identified as many as 293 coronaviruses in and around the mine.
The institute in November 2020 disclosed the existence of eight other “SARS-type” coronavirus samples taken from the site.
In a preprint last month, Shi and other researchers said none of the eight was a closer match to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13. Crucially, none of them possessed the key receptor binding domain that allows SARS-CoV-2 to infect humans so efficiently.
The paper concluded that “the experimental evidence cannot support” claims that SARS-CoV-2 was leaked from the lab, and called for “more systematic and longitudinal sampling of bats, pangolins or other possible intermediate animals” to better understand where the pandemic originated.
As the specialists have been saying for the last fifteen months, a pandemic wasn’t a matter of if, but a matter of when.
Coronavirus ‘Bioweapons’ From China: Bats in A MinePost + Comments (64)