[ad_1]
GENEVA: Renowned American epidemiologist Larry Brilliant has urged China to be “radically transparent” if it wants to avoid suspicion on the issue. origin if the new coronavirus.
Theories abound as to the source of the virus that has caused the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed nearly 300,000 people worldwide in a matter of months.
Scientists believe that the virus, which emerged in China late last year, originated from bats and jumped from them directly to humans or through other animals before reaching humans.
But there is also widespread speculation that the virus, called SARS-CoV-2, was either made as a biological weapon or escaped from a Chinese laboratory working on the related SARS virus.
Brilliant told AFP in a recent interview that China’s “suspicious behavior”, by refusing to allow international experts to enter and even blocking Chinese scientists from investigating the origin, was fueling such theories.
“Chinese scientists should be allowed, and should be allowed, to study the origin of the disease,” said Brilliant, who helped lead the World Health Organization’s campaign to eradicate smallpox four decades ago.
The United States and Australia have called for an international investigation, but China has declined and has yet to respond to a WHO request for an invitation to help investigate the origin of the virus.
Not designed
Brilliant, who served as a consultant on the terrifyingly realistic 2011 pandemic horror film “Contagion,” dismissed the claim by some that the virus may have been artificially manufactured.
He stressed that studies of the genome show that it is 95% identical to the original SARS virus, which caused a global scare in 2003.
The 5% difference clearly results from a natural evolution that, among other things, has made the new virus more transmissible, he said.
“If it were a biological weapon, there would have been substantially more differences, and it would have been easy to see that those differences had been designed,” he said.
The suspicions of EE. USA They focus in particular on the possibility of the virus escaping from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, but Brilliant emphasized that if that were the case, it should be seen as an accident.
“No one will be angry if it was an accident or if they had been in the country before” than in December, when the first alerts came out of Wuhan, he said.
“But suspicious behavior doesn’t benefit anyone.”
Brilliant stressed the importance of finding the first human case of Covid-19 and understanding when the outbreak really started.
Explosives outbreak
“There is a reasonable hypothesis that the virus was leaking into China in November or even earlier, going from human to human,” he said.
A much earlier start could help explain why the outbreak in Wuhan earlier this year was so “explosive,” he said, noting that it generally took weeks for the virus to accumulate steam.
But, he lamented, “we cannot test this hypothesis due to the terrible behavior of the Chinese government.”
Brilliant cautioned that China’s attempts to block a vital view of the virus’s origins “was not rational” and fueled rumors that it was “being used politically to increase hatred.”
“I would tell my Chinese friends that they are interested in finding out where the first cases went and being radically transparent,” he said.
Although a number of countries have begun to relax the restrictions, with officials emboldened by falling infection and death rates, fears of further waves of transmission are pervasive.
In Wuhan, whose 11 million residents spent 76 days in a confinement lifted on April 8, a new group of cases was reported this week.
Do the tests
Brilliant denounced that countries had not learned from humanity’s triumph over smallpox 40 years ago over how to beat a virus.
Unlike Covid-19, there was a vaccine to aid in the fight against smallpox.
But Brilliant insisted that equally important at the time was global cooperation and the massive efforts made to detect every case, and completely track and isolate every contact.
Today, in the meantime, rampant nationalism has replaced international cooperation, and many countries appear to have given up testing and contact tracing as too harsh, and imposed blockades instead, he said.
“Our focus has been to abandon Plan A due to leadership failures. Now we are in Plan Z, ”he said, rejecting the claim of many governments that it was too difficult to expand the evidence.
“That is irresponsible … It is not that difficult,” he said. “We can put a man on the moon.”
“Get everyone out of their asses and do the tests.”
