There are new indications that the Covid 19 pandemic was triggered by a laboratory accident. This was stated by Giorgio Palu, in an interview with Corriere della Sera, in which he argues that “the spillover with an animal-human species jump could have been carried out for accidental causes by a bat virus experimentally adapted to grow in vitro”. the expert “one can hypothesize a manipulation carried out for research purposes only , certainly not with malicious intentions . It wouldn’t be the first time a virus has accidentally escaped a high-security laboratory, “he notes.
The president of the Italian drug agency emphasizes “a suggestive fact, which will in any case be confirmed by further checks. The Wuhan prototype strain, the one that began to manifest itself in China with severe forms of pneumonia, and all the resulting variants, have a distinctive feature. A sequence of 19 letters belonging to a human gene and absent from all the genomes of the human, animal, bacterial and plant viruses sequenced up to now appears in the gene that produces the Spike protein (the one that the virus uses to hook the cell to be infected) .The probability of this being a random event is roughly one in a trillion. An essential sequence because it gives the virus the ability to fuse with human cells and to cause disease “.
On what the purpose of the study could have been , he argues: “For example to find out if certain mammalian viruses, in this case the bat, may have pandemic potential and decipher which genetic characteristics contribute to it.”
The hypothesis of the origin of the virus from the bat with a direct passage to man or indirect through an intermediate host always remains standing.
“Some recent studies, which use bioinformatics to investigate the evolution of the virus, would orient us in this direction. However, the queen proof that supports the natural origin is missing. To validate which of the hypotheses in the field is more likely, it would be desirable, as The collaboration of the Chinese authorities has been requested several times by the WHO and the scientific community “, explains Palu. Finding out where this virus comes from “is extremely useful. By identifying a possible intermediate host, it would be possible to trace the initial source of the infection and block epidemic transmission, as has happened for other viruses from the animal world”.
A similar position is that of Arnaldo Caruso , president of the Italian Society of Virologyand full professor of microbiology and clinical microbiology at the University of Brescia. According to the expert, it cannot be excluded that the Sars CoV 2 virus escaped from a laboratory like the one in Wuhan where experiments on bats were conducted. “By carelessly manipulating the virus – says Caruso – there could have been the contamination of a human coronavirus with cells infected with bat coronavirus and therefore, in the laboratory, there could have been recombination between the two viruses”.
The president of the Italian Virology Society however warns: “As we isolate and characterize the bat virus we discover forms that are increasingly close to those of Sars CoV 2, data that suggest that the species jump could have occurred.naturally . At the moment these two hypotheses coexist and it is necessary to wait for further studies and verifications “.
