Submitted to the Morning Star today
China’s
virology research community has been heroic and innovative in its
extraordinary research done on the coronavirus, as Carlos Martinez
explained ("China’s successes in the fight against Covid-19.” Morning Star, 11-12,
April)
But
in John Wright’s feature “Sorry, facts don’t care about Trump’s feelings,” MS
25-26 April) – in which he argues for primacy of “stubborn facts” - he himself
fails to follow his own dictum.
His
milestone dates presenting the sequence of development suffers from errors of
omission.
For
example, while the Chinese Government in Beijing did inform the WHO
of a viral break out on 31 December, this warning came after the nationalist
Government in Taiwan said they reported this to both International Health
Regulations (IHR) -a WHO ‘framework for exchange’ of epidemic prevention
and response data between 196 countries, and Chinese health authorities - on
December 31.
Taipei
said many of its doctors had heard from mainland colleagues that medical staff
were getting ill — a sign of human-to-human transmission- during December 2019,
weeks before the wet food market in Wuhan had been identified as possible cause
of the fugitive viral escape. But the warning was not shared with other
countries.
The
IHR’s internal website provides a platform for all countries to share
information on the epidemic and their response. But none of the information
shared by Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control was posted, because the WHO does
not recognize the international status of Taiwan as a separate nation.
In
2018, the Chinese state Nanjing Military Research Institute published details
research on a new bat virus they had found near Zhoushan city, in the
eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang.
Building
on this, the celebrated female virologist, Dr Zhi Zhengli of the Wuhan
Virology Research Institute (WVRI) did complex research on
‘splitting’ the Sars virus, producing four key papers [published in
Western science journals], that looked into the possibility of developing
self-replicating synthetic coronaviruses ( assessing the c so-called “S”
protein)
One
key paper from WVRI virologists, published in the UK medical journal, The
Lancet on 24 January 2020, explains from their micro-analysis of
early reported Covid cases, that 14 out of 41 (ie around a third) examined
could not be traced at all to the wet food market.
Two
days later, the United States’ Government Centers for Diseases Control
published a pap on viral transfer from bats. Nature journal followed
this up on 3 February with an analysis of the link to bats of the coronavirus
by now spreading widely worldwide
They
found the new virus – whose full ‘genome sequence’ had been published by
the Chinese Government on 10 January - was not one found in the
kind of bats sometimes on sale at the Wuhan wet food market..
Which
leaves the unanswered question: what was the original source of the fugitive
virus in Wuhan, if not the market?
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