A thorough, objective investigation of the true origin of COVID-19 is long overdue.
The narrative promoted by China as to the origin of COVID-19 and the one quickly adopted by the scientific establishment and the media has always been that COVID-19, while circulating in a bat population, mutated, acquiring the ability to infect humans, which was then transmitted to people either visiting or working in the Wuhan Seafood Market.
On February 3, 2020, Chinese researchers led by Zheng-Li Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology published an article in the prestigious journal Nature, which became the basis of the naturally-occurring narrative by identifying a previously unknown bat coronavirus, RaTg13, as a close relative to COVID-19.
A month later, using RaTG13 as a linchpin of its argument, Western scientists published “The Proximal Origin of SAR-CoV-2,” which became the single most widely-cited article by scientists and the media to support the contention that COVID-19 came from nature.
Thus originated the “wide scientific consensus” claimed even by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the United States in its April 30, 2020 statement that COVID-19 “was not manmade or genetically modified.”
It did not take long for doubts about the validity of the RaTG13 argument or even its existence to appear, as the April 25, 2020 article “Is Bat Coronavirus 4991 a Smoking Gun in China’s COVID-19 Cover-up?” will attest.
We have now learned that RaTG13 existed only on paper. RaTG13 and BtCoV/4991 are the same virus.
How long has this been known by the scientists involved and has it been part of a deliberate deception?
Although sequenced earlier, the entire RaTG13 genome was later uploaded to the National Institutes of Health GenBank with an updated timestamp of March 24, 2020 and an accession number MN996532.1.
In that filing, there is no mention of BtCoV/4991.
Yet, in a Chinese virus database, dated March 7, 2020 in the source code, RaTG13 and BtCoV/4991 are listed as equivalent and links to the NIH GenBank. It means that China knew early on that RaTG13 was not a unique coronavirus, but merely a duplicate of BtCoV/4991, but kept that important fact secret.
What else has China been hiding?
The numerous inconsistencies in the theory that COVID-19 is naturally-occurring are well-documented.
A thorough, objective investigation of the true origin of COVID-19 is long overdue.
This column was originally published at WION.
The views expressed in CCNS member articles are not necessarily the views or positions of the entire CCNS. They are the views of the authors, who are members of the CCNS.
