China blames India, others for Covid

Efforts by Chinese scientists are under way to frame a narrative on the origin of SARS-CoV-2

Hyderabad: A year after the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic that has so far infected nearly 95 lakh individuals and claimed 1.4 lakh lives in India, a concerted effort from China is under way to shift the blame for the origin of the coronavirus from the wet markets of Wuhan province to other countries, including India.

For the last few months, Chinese scientists and researchers are making efforts to frame a narrative that claims that the SARS-CoV-2 virus pre-existed and was circulating in many European countries, including Italy and Spain, even before it was detected in Wuhan in December, 2019.

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With the impending visit of a team from WHO to investigate the origin of coronavirus, a group of Chinese scientists have now submitted a paper to The Lancet journal, claiming that the virus might have originated from the ‘Indian Subcontinent’.

Although the paper titled ‘The Early Cryptic Transmission and Evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in Human Hosts’ is yet to be peer reviewed, its preprint version is already available online and has attracted a lot of attention. Essentially, it claims that coronavirus originated in the Indian Subcontinent.

The paper from Chinese scientists Libing Shen of Chinese Academy of Sciences and Funan He of Fudan University interprets that ‘Indian subcontinent might be the place where the earliest human-to-human SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurred, which was three or four months prior to the Wuhan outbreak’.

The claims by the Chinese scientists have elicited sharp reaction from the scientific community, especially from Europe and the United States, who have been charting the course of the virus since its outbreak.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reacted to the claims of the Chinese scientists by maintaining that it would be speculative for it to say that coronavirus did not emerge in China.
During a virtual interaction with press persons, Executive Director, WHO Health Emergencies Programme, Dr Michael Ryan said “I think it’s highly speculative for us to say that the disease did not emerge in China.”

The top WHO official said “It is clear from a public health perspective that you start your investigations where the human cases first emerged,” he said, adding that evidence might then lead to other places. Ryan repeated that the WHO intended to send researchers to the Wuhan food market to probe the virus origins further.

Director, UCL Genetics Institute and Professor of Computational Systems Biology at University College of London, Professor Francois Balloux described the paper by Chinese researchers as ‘gibberish’.

“A piece of gibberish nonsense arguing SARSCoV2 originated in India, submitted to the Lancet. I can only hope that the process of ‘peer review’ will weed this one out promptly,” he tweeted.

 

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