Three years of the bloody pandemic

As yet another sign of the times of confrontation between the United States and China, this biological warfare, which to date has killed 6,884,267 people worldwide, is part of the blame game between Washington and Beijing that blames each other for having deliberately provoked the pandemic.

The only incontestable fact is that, so far, there is no single irrefutable truth about how SARS-CoV-2 jumped to humans and triggered a pandemic of unimaginable proportions to such an extent that it plunged the world into a period of lockdowns, confinements, curfews, emergency declarations and quarantines that took humanity back to the Middle Ages.

To date, virologists and public health experts have yet to find a concrete answer as to the origin of SARS-CoV-2, although most agree on the possibility that it is zoonotic.

The WHO warns that this new coronavirus has never before been detected or identified in humans. The first case appeared at the end of December 2019 in the Chinese province of Hubei, in its capital Wuhan.

Information on the virus warns that it is "highly transmissible" and coughing and sneezing are believed to be the most common routes of transmission, and it is also spread by droplets expelled into the air by infected people. No vaccine has yet been found to stop an infected person from spreading the virus, hence the recommendation of quarantines for people who test positive and their contact groups. 

On the origin of the virus, a few days ago, Christopher Wray, director of the FBI, once again pointed to China as the origin of the virus, after pointing to the hypothesis of the leakage of COVID-19 from a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan as the most likely cause.

Recently, the US Department of Energy issued an internal report stating that the coronavirus "most likely" originated in a Chinese lab, as The Wall Street Journal reported.

But there is also disagreement within the US because there are agencies within the United States that, on the other hand, consider the origin of SARS-CoV-2 to be of natural origin.

John Kirby himself, spokesman for the White House National Security Council, told the US media that there is no unanimous opinion among US government agencies as to how the pandemic began and who is responsible.  

On the other hand, according to Mao Ning, Foreign Ministry spokesman, the United States is still trying to defame and slander China by creating conspiracy theories that talk of deliberate laboratory leaks. For months, the Beijing government has been denouncing the politicisation of the pandemic and its use to create further confrontation between Washington and Beijing. Even among the scientific community itself there is no consensus and the positions are either: a provoked virus, a laboratory accident or a naturally occurring zoonotic virus that jumped from animal to human.

A few days ago I spoke to Juan Jesús Gestal Otero, epidemiologist and member of the Royal Academy of Medicine of Galicia, who told me that it will be very difficult to establish the origin of the virus: whether it was really a natural origin due to the people who visited the Wuhan market or whether it was a virus that escaped from the Wuhan Virological Institute working with this pathogen.

"There was a WHO mission authorised by China to visit the country, to Wuhan, to determine the origin of the virus... when they went there a year into the pandemic; the members of that mission did not ask questions during the visit, they did not explore the possibility that there might have been any incident or failure in the security of the laboratory.   In their report, they stated that it was most likely of natural origin and left the door open that it could also be due to a laboratory leak", in the words of Gestal Otero.

By the time the mission wanted to return to China, he adds, the Chinese authorities would not allow it.  Thus, the origin of the virus will never be known.     

The WHO team included the scientist Ben Embarek, who went there with a team made up of colleagues from different parts of the world. After their very short investigation, the mission concluded that: "The coronavirus did not come out of a laboratory, accidentally or otherwise, and the origin of the infection did not start in the Huanan market either, as the virus was already circulating in other parts of the city, but never before December".

However, in August last year, Embarek told his country's Danish television station TV2 that the infection may have happened after a researcher inside the Wuhan laboratory became infected while handling a bat coronavirus.

For China, the origin of the virus is a closed point, the government of President Xi Jinping considers that the WHO mission has already been facilitated and defends that neither Wuhan, nor any other city was ground zero for the coronavirus, but that the pathogen's contagion began in another country and that China was the first to detect massive cases. We will never know the truth...