05/26/2021 / By Nolan Barton
In April 2012, six miners entered a copper mine in the Mojiang Hani Autonomous County to remove bat feces. After working there for 14 days, all workers felt sick with severe symptoms such as high fever, dry cough and sore limbs.
The most detailed account of the miners’ illness comes in a 66-page master’s thesis by Li Xu from the School of Clinical Medicine at Kunming Medical University in southwest China. His thesis, supervised by the hospital’s emergency chief at the time, describes how a 42-year-old man known only as Lu was admitted there on April 25, 2012.
Lu had been clearing bat feces at the mine and had suffered from a fever and cough for two weeks. For the previous three days, he had trouble breathing and had begun coughing up rust-color mucus spotted with blood. A CT scan revealed severe pneumonia, with the same lung markings now seen in many COVID-19 patients.
Five others who worked at the mine, ages 30 to 63, were admitted to the same hospital. All had similar symptoms.
Doctors consulted experts in respiratory disease, including Zhong Nanshan, who had led the fight against China’s 2002 and 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Zhong diagnosed the miner’s with pneumonia, most likely caused by a virus, and recommended testing them for SARS antibodies and identifying the type of bats in the mine.
The hospital contacted experts from several other institutions, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). None could identify what caused the miners’ illness. By mid-August 2012, three of them were dead. The suspicion was that it was a bat-borne SARS-like coronavirus, according to Li’s thesis.
Scientists from the WIV took samples from bats in the mine and identified several new coronaviruses. An advanced virology institution, the WIV has the only P4 laboratory – the highest level of biosafety for a lab – in China and the biggest repository of bat coronaviruses in Asia.
According to a published research paper, WIV scientists took fecal samples from 276 bats in the mine and identified six different species. They extracted genetic material from the samples and sequenced fragments. Half of the samples tested positive for coronaviruses, including an unidentified strain of a SARS-like one, according to the scientists. They called that virus RaBtCoV/4991.
All six bat species showed evidence of coronavirus co-infection, the researchers found. In other words, the virus could easily exchange genetic material with similar ones to create a new coronavirus.
That research was led by Shi Zhengli, also known as the “Bat Woman,” the WIV’s leading bat coronavirus expert. When the results were published in 2016 in the journal Virologica Sinica, few scientists paid attention to RaBtCoV/4991. It came from an abandoned mine, said the paper, which made no mention of the miners who fell sick there.
In February 2020, Shi and her colleagues published a paper in the scientific journal Nature, revealing the existence of a virus called RaTG13. Sequencing had revealed it was 96.2 percent genetic similar to SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19. This makes RaTG13 the closest known relative of the latter.
But some scientists outside China noticed striking similarities in the sampling dates and partial genetic sequences of the virus called RaTG13 and RaBtCoV/4991, which Shi’s team had previously found in the mine.
After repeated requests by scientists to clarify the issue, Shi said that the two viruses were one and the same. She updated the paper in Nature in November to reflect that and include details about the sick miners.
The unanswered questions about the miners’ illness, the coronaviruses found at the mine and the research done with those at WIV bolstered the idea that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, the city where the first cases of COVID-19 were found in December 2019.
There were reports that three WIV researchers became ill enough in November 2019 that they sought local hospital care. In January, the Department of State said that several WIV researchers became sick in autumn 2019 “with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness.”
The Biden administration has asked the World Health Organization (WHO) conduct a more thorough investigation into the possibility of a lab leak.
A U.S. health official stated that a new investigation should include other laboratories in Wuhan, not just the WIV, and the team conducting it should include laboratory safety experts.
“We should be able to look at biosafety records and interview staff members,” the official said.
China is expected to resist any such effort. It has denied that SARS-CoV-2 came from one of its labs or infected any WIV staff, and wants the WHO to investigate whether the pandemic began outside Chinese borders.
“The U.S. keeps concocting inconsistent claims and clamoring to investigate labs in Wuhan,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a written statement. “This fully shows that some people in the U.S. don’t care about facts and truth.” It cited the WHO-led team’s verdict on the implausibility of a lab leak and urged Washington to invite the WHO to investigate early U.S. cases.
A growing number of virologists, biologists and other leading scientists are calling for a closer examination of the lab-leak theory. (Related: Top researchers insist Wuhan coronavirus lab escape theory still viable, call for more investigations.)
Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, said in a recent Senate hearing that the “possibility certainly exists” that COVID-19 virus might have escaped from a Wuhan lab.
“I am totally in favor of a full investigation of whether that could have happened,” said Fauci, also the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
On May 13, a group of 18 scientists from universities including Harvard University, Stanford University and Yale University published an open letter in the academic journal Science calling for serious consideration of the lab hypothesis and urging research laboratories to open their records.
Among the signatories to the letter was Ralph Baric, a microbiologist at the University of North Carolina who worked with the WIV on a study to create an artificial coronavirus that infected human cells in the lab.
“A rigorous investigation would have reviewed the biosafety level under which bat coronavirus research was conducted at WIV,” Baric said. “It would have included detailed information on the training procedures with records, the safety procedures with records and strategies that were in place to prevent inadvertent or accidental escape.”
The WHO-led team that visited Wuhan early this year concluded in a joint report with Chinese experts in March that COVID-19 most likely moved from bats to humans via another mammal, and ranked a laboratory leak at the bottom of its list. The team, which only spent three hours at WIV, had little to go on beyond assurances from the institute’s own staff, team members say.
Some scientists question why the WHO-led team hasn’t been able to arrange antibody tests and surveys of people and animals around the mine that held the virus most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. The team has recommended such research, but the “timeline is still not clear,” said Peter Ben Embarek, the food-safety scientist who led the team. “Ideally, starting soon.”
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Tagged Under: Anthony Fauci, Bat Woman, coronavirus, covid-19, covid-19 pandemic, Joe Biden, lab-leak theory, Mojiang mine, pandemic, SARS, SARS-CoV-2, Shi Zhengli, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Wuhan lab
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