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'...signatures.'
'But such signatures are missing in this virus.'
The new SARS Coronavirus still continues to puzzle the world.
More than a year after its appearance, debates continue on its origin.
"It is not a virus that was evolved in a lab to be a perfect virus to cause a pandemic," Dr Shahid Jameel, the well known virologist, tells Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier in the first part of a two-part interview.
The theory that the covid virus originated in a lab and not in the wet market is gaining momentum once again.
Whichever scientist I spoke to in the last year vehemently opposed the theory that it was a bioengineered virus.
As a virologist, do you think it is created in a lab and leaked from there?
Knowing the methods that virologists use and the technologies that are available, it is unlikely (that it was created in a lab).
In science, you cannot say anything is impossible. But it is unlikely that this covid virus is created in a lab.
There are diametrically opposite views floating around. One is that it jumped from a bat to a human.
Through an intermediary?
Maybe there is an intermediary. Maybe not. Because nobody has found the intermediary yet.
The second theory is that it was created in a lab.
There is also a third possibility, that it was not intentionally created in a gain of function experiment.
But it was possibly worked up in the lab and could have leaked, not intentionally, but accidentally.
Again, there is no evidence to prove the possibility.
Then people ask, how can the virus jump to humans and directly infect them?
Is it possible to infect humans without an intermediary?
It is possible. You don't always need an intermediary. Viruses can jump directly to humans.
In fact, the same scientific group in China reported on the 27th of May about another virus that was closer to SARS CoV2 than the RaTG13 bat coronavirus.
The paper talks about the virus directly binding to ACE2 receptors on human cells.
This virus was not very well adapted to humans when it emerged in December 2019, but has since then it evolved in humans to get better and better.
The first mutation that happened was D614G, which was first seen in January 2020 and from then on quickly became the dominant virus in the population.
Almost all the present variants are derived from it.
Several other variants have emerged as 'variants of concern' like the Alpha variant, the Beta variant, the Gamma variant and the Delta variant.
And there are several 'variants of interest' circulating as well.
All of these variants have improved the ability of the virus to infect humans and transmit between humans.
It is not a virus that was evolved in a lab to be a perfect virus to cause a pandemic.
You feel this conspiracy theory is more political than scientific.
It appears so. People do want answers, but there are no clear-cut answers either way.
Just because evidence is missing, doesn't mean evidence is not there.
It only means that we haven't found the evidence yet.
Let's look at what the key arguments are on the lab leak theory.
It says that scientists collected the virus from animals like the bats and kept in the lab for study.
Or, they have bioengineered the coronavirus genome in the lab.
One argument in favour of that theory is, it is suspicious that even after a year and a half, the closest relatives haven't been found in any animal species.
Another point people is that the virus contains some unusual features and genetic sequences, eg. a furin cleavage site, suggesting that it is engineered by humans.
Is that a possibility?
When you engineer a virus, you leave behind signatures, but such signatures are missing in this virus.
Evolution does not leave signatures, but lab creations would.
Now, coming to the argument that just because no animal species was found as an intermediary, it must have been created in the lab, is wrong.
It took 14 years to find out that the Himalayan palm civet was the intermediary animal in the SARS epidemic of 2002 and 2003.
The virus jumped from the bat to the civet cat before reaching human beings.
Here, we are talking about a short time period of over a year.
The problem is, animals are not often infected at a very high level and they also sometimes don't show the symptoms.
And, how many animals are you going to survey to find an intermediary? In China, they have already looked at something like 80,000 wild and domesticated animals.
That is one argument that is used by some for the lab leak theory; that 80,000 animals have tested and an intermediary has not been found.
But 80,000 is a tiny fraction of the number of animals that are there in the country.
Do you think because there is a virology lab in Wuhan and the first case was in Wuhan make people suspicious?
Yes, some ask, is it just a coincidence that the lab in Wuhan has coronaviruses and the outbreak started there? I would say this is probably just a coincidence.
Virology labs are very specialised labs. They tend to be situated in places where there are sources of those viruses.
China has a lab to study coronaviruses because you find a lot of coronaviruses there.
Similarly, there are influenza labs in Asia, dengue fever labs in Latin America and yellow fever labs in Africa.
If a new dengue virus emerges in Latin America, you can't say that they leaked the virus.
I don't think any of these arguments hold much water. They are not scientific.
People who have written these articles are making arguments that it is lab created because of lack of evidence.
Do you think these arguments are going around because China is very secretive about documents?
Forget about China. If India were asked to do it, would India do it? Would America do it? Would any independent country do it?
I think it is too much to expect for them to make all their records open.
Yes, people are demanding, but it is possibly not going to happen.
I don't think this situation is going to be resolved soon.
The only way the origin can be established is, if China gives access to the complete record of that lab -- if China opens the notebooks, the computers and the freezers. That is unlikely to happen.
Should they be secretive about how a virology lab works?
No, they should not be secretive, but the world doesn't work in a simple manner.
Yes, they should open up their records to satisfy the world. But they are simply saying, who are you to ask?
They are now saying that the virus was created in the US and brought to China through the military. And that is also without any evidence.
Do you think like the SARS 2002 and 2003 mystery, it may take decades to solve this mystery too?
I think so. All these arguments aside, whatever we know about this virus and the way it has evolved, it does suggest that it is a natural origin virus.
It did not come into the human population heavily adapted. It continues to adapt through mutations.
This, I think is a fairly good scientific argument; that here is a virus that possibly originated naturally.
Everything that people have presented so far is based on associations and coincidences with just circumstantial evidence.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com