by Matt Ridley at Spiked
I have covered genomic research for years and written several books on the topic. I have a reputation as a strong supporter of biotechnology. But I had not realised just how risky some of the experiments being done on viruses have become in recent years, let alone that they are happening in the centre of a large city.
In recent years in the city of Wuhan, in China, scientists were combining the genomes of coronaviruses taken from bats and making chimera (hybrid viruses) that grew up to 10,000 times more quickly than their parent viruses and were more than three times as lethal to ‘humanised’ mice. Whether similar experiments resulted in the Covid-19 pandemic is still unknown, but they could have done.
In researching our book Viral, updated and newly released in paperback, on the origin of Covid-19, the scientist Alina Chan and I concluded that it is highly likely the outbreak began in Wuhan. The earliest Covid cases in other parts of China, and other countries, link straight back to this modern and prosperous city on the banks of the Yangtze. For instance, a case in Beijing who fell ill as early as 17 December 2019 turns out to have travelled that day from Wuhan.
Nor is there much doubt that the virus came originally from a horseshoe bat living a long way south of Wuhan. The closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 in the wild were found in horseshoe bats in a mineshaft in Yunnan, in a limestone cave in Laos and in a cave in Mengla county on the Yunnan-Laos border. The central question is, and always has been, who or what brought a bat virus more than a thousand miles north in the autumn of 2019 to the middle of a modern city?…