“Our theory of the origin of the pandemic is in principle the only coherent one that exists,” said Dr. Jonathan Latham.
By Josh Plank, World Israel News
Scientists at the non-profit Bioscience Resource Project in Ithaca, New York, have discovered that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus strain that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, first appeared in 2012 in a handful of Chinese miners.
“Our theory of the origin of the pandemic is in principle the only coherent one that exists,” said Drs. Jonathan Latham in a Facebook post on August 10th.
Dr. Latham and Dr. Allison Wilson, co-founder of the Bioscience Resource Project, published her findings on her website, Independent Science News, on July 15 in an article entitled, “A Proposed Origin for SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
“No one has found major flaws in it since we published it on July 15,” Latham said.
“Our proposal is that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where it was obtained from Kunming Medical University,” he said.
“They in turn got it from tissues belonging to six miners who became ill in 2012 with a mysterious coronavirus infection that caused COVID-like symptoms.”
The researchers point out that the known viral genome sequence most closely related to SARS-CoV-2 is RaTG13, which was collected from the Mojiang mine in 2013 by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
In April 2012, six workers in the mine, located about 1,000 km from Wuhan, fell ill with a mysterious disease while removing garlic cloves. Three of the six died later.
By translating a master’s study written in Chinese, Latham and Wilson discovered that the miners’ symptoms were very similar to those of COVID-19.
The master’s dissertation concluded that “the unknown virus could lead to severe pneumonia: The SARS-like CoV of the Chinese rufous horse bat.”
Samples taken from the miners were later sent to the lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from which researchers suggest it escaped in 2019.
Two of the miners were sick for more than four months, which may have given the virus a unique opportunity to develop and adapt to a human host.
“It is a well-established principle that viruses that jump species undergo a rapid evolutionary change in their new host,” said Latham and Wilson.
However, Sars-CoV-2 has been “functionally unchanged or virtually” since the pandemic began.
“That is to say, their evolutionary leap toward humans was completed before the 2019 pandemic began,” the researchers said.
Latham and Wilson advocate for “an independent and transparent investigation” of the Wuhan lab.
“The scientific establishment has labeled the laby escape theory a ‘rumor’, ‘an’ unverified theory ‘and a’ conspiracy ‘if the proper name is a hypothesis,” they said.
“By taking this position, the scientific institution has given the unequivocal message that scientists who take the possibility of a laboratory seriously are jeopardizing their careers,” Latham and Wilson said.
