A test-tube virus?

In March last year, the 2008 Nobel laureate in medicine, Luc Montagnier, told a French television station that he hypothesised that SARS-CoV-2 had been created by manipulating the HIV virus in some way. 

A month later, Li-Meng, a Hong Kong virologist at the School of Public Health, arrived in the United States seeking political asylum on the grounds that she was being persecuted to death by the Chinese authorities because she knew "the truth" about the coronavirus. 

The researcher gave interviews to a multitude of American media outlets asserting that it had been artificially created by the communist government to harm the world and that both the Chinese authorities and the WHO concealed the fact that it could be transmitted from person to person, something that was already known at the time because the information was included in the communiqués issued by the agency itself and available on its website. 

Neither Montagnier, whose pabulum has been disqualified by the international scientific community, nor Li-Meng, have been able to reliably prove that the technique exists to create SARS-CoV-2 in a laboratory without leaving a cut-and-paste trace in its genetic code. 

There is much suspicion surrounding the virus, which is also seen as an open competition between West and East; without logical evidence to the contrary, the pandemic unleashed in 2020 has plunged the world into biological warfare.  

Nor does US President Joe Biden believe the most recent conclusion of the team of specialised researchers from the World Health Organisation (WHO) who, on the spot in Wuhan, China, have determined that the origin of SARS-CoV-2 has nothing to do with a laboratory accident.  

The US State Department does not agree with this report and is demanding a special investigation, with its own experts, and that Xi Jinping's government allow them to move freely on Chinese territory to investigate the origin of the coronavirus.  

Since the beginning of the pandemic, the US position has been unwavering towards China, pointing to it as directly responsible for the spread of the virus; the previous president, Donald Trump, went so far as to reiterate recurrently and with a certain contemptuous tone that "the Chinese virus" hid certain destabilising and even disturbing purposes. 

His then secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, on multiple occasions accused the Beijing regime of being behind a conspiracy against the White House and pointed to WHO director general Tedros Adhanom as acting in collusion to protect Chinese interests and "lies". 

Trump called him Jinping's "pimp" and directly responsible for the spread of the virus by misinforming the world of the true extent of the viral catastrophe and its capacity for transmission, an argument that precipitated the US's exit from the health agency.  

While Biden, among his first steps at the helm of the White House, has brought his country back into the ranks of the WHO, there is no change in the position he took a few months ago: he also wants an independent investigation.  

The mission arrived in Wuhan on January 14 with little room for manoeuvre, having spent two weeks confined to a hotel in the city, practically spending more time in quarantine than making enquiries and collecting relevant data: in record time - twelve days - they presented their findings on the virus. 

According to Ben Embarek, his team arrived in Wuhan with four hypotheses under their belts: "We started with several assumptions as the point of origin of SARS-CoV-2, first that it was of zoonotic origin; second, a transmission from animal to animal host to human host; third, a virus spread by the cold chain of some frozen food; and finally, the possibility of a laboratory accident". 

After a very short investigation, the mission concluded that: "The coronavirus did not come out of a laboratory, accidentally or otherwise, and the origin of the contagion did not start in the Huanan market either, as the virus was already circulating in other parts of the city, but never before December". 

When might there be some light on the truth about the pathogen? According to scientist Peter Daszak, it will take two years, but less optimistic in Singapore is Wang Linfa, the scientist who found the source of SARS in 2003 and is still investigating the origin of Ebola; in his experience, it could take up to four decades to find the point of origin.