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15 August 2020 | 2:39 p.m.
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The coronavirus may not have originated on a Wuhan wet market last year, but 1000 miles away in 2012 – deep in a Chinese mineshaft where workers descended on a mysterious, pneumonia-like disease after being exposed to bat.
Virologist Jonathan Latham and molecular biologist Allison Wilson, both of the non-profit Bioscience Resource Project in Ithaca, came to their conclusion after translating a 66-page masterthesis from the Chinese medical doctor who treated the miners and their tissue -samples sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for testing.
“The evidence it contains has led us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Latham and Wilson wrote in an article published on July 15 on their website, “Independent Science News. “
Latham told The Post that the coronavirus “almost certainly” escaped from the Wuhan lab.
In April 2012, six miners at the Mojiang mine in southwestern China’s Yunnan province fell ill after spending more than 14 days in battering rams. Three eventually died.
In his dissertation, Dr. Li Xu, who treated the miners, described how the patients had a high fever, a dry cough, sore limbs and, in some cases, headaches – all symptoms now associated with COVID-19, he said. Latham and Wilson.
How the miners were treated – for example with ventilation and a variety of medications including steroids, blood thinners and antibiotics – is also similar to how COVID-19 patients are treated worldwide, they said.
After performing several tests for hepatitis, dengue fever and even HIV, the doctor consulted with several specialists throughout China, including virologist Zhong Nanshan, an international hero who managed the SARS outbreak in 2003 and is considered the greatest scientist. of the country.
“The remote meeting with Zhong Nanshan is important,” Latham and Wilson said. “It implies that the diseases of the six miners were of great concern, and, second, that a SARS-like coronavirus was considered a probable cause.”
The doctor also sent sample tissues of the miners to the Wuhan lab, a focal point of coronavirus research in China. There, scientists found the source of infection was a SARS-like coronavirus from a Chinese rufous horse bat, according to the dissertation.
Latham and Wilson believe that the virus – once in the miners’s – “evolved” into SARS CoV-2, “an unusually pathogenic human coronavirus,” and the specimens eventually escaped from the lab, launching something into it. coronavirus is morphed. pandemic.
New York scientists highlighted their COVID-19 origin hypothesis “the Mojiang Miners Passage”; “Continuation” is a virological term for adapting viruses to new species, they said.
Although scientists at the Wuhan lab have collected coronavirus samples from bats at the same mines, they are missing the 2012 connection, Latham told The Post.
Indeed, Shi Zhengli, a virologist at the Wuhan Lab known as’ the batwoman ‘for her extensive research into bat-derived coronaviruses, told Scientific American in June that the miners had died of a fungal infection,’ although it would have it was only a matter of time before they caught the coronaviruses if the mine was not shut down immediately, ‘the magazine reported.
“The mine-ash smelled like hell,” Shi told the magazine. “Batguano, covered with mold, throws up the cave.”
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Response to the Latham-Wilson find has gradually received positive reviews from the scientific community in the US. Renowned American geneticist and molecular engineer George Church shared her work on Twitter in July. The tweet received 304 retweets and 403 likes. Stuart Newman, a leading expert on cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College in Westchester, called it “the best sourced statement yet of the origin of # SARSCoV2” in a July 19 tweet about the report.
“We feel like the underground is circulating in the scientific community,” Latham said. “People think it has merits, but they are reluctant to go public because the coronavirus has become very political.”
Chinese officials claim that the coronavirus, which has infected more than 19 million worldwide and killed nearly 800,000, originated in Wuhan in December, when it crossed the species barrier of animals for sale at Huanan’s sea market.
But many scientists still doubt the origin of the infection, especially after the market was cleaned up and shut down by government officials almost as soon as the pandemic began to spread.
