Virus researchers — who are familiar with lab accidents and how research on coronaviruses is conducted — say there is virtually zero chance that the novel coronavirus was released as result of a lab accident, despite misinformation being circulated.
"We're finding 1 to 7 million people exposed to these viruses every year in Southeast Asia; that's the pathway. It's just so obvious to all of us working in the field," he says.Despite the evidence, misinformation about the virus's origins continue to proliferate. For Daszak, who has worked on other outbreaks, the pattern is all too familiar:"Every time we get a new virus emerging, we have people that say, 'This could have come from a lab,'"he says.
Daszak says the time for finger-pointing is over."We have a bat virus in my neighborhood in New York killing people," he says."Let's get real about this." "I will tell you, more and more, we're hearing the story," Trump said on April 15 of the theory that the virus came from labs in Wuhan. "The real risk is in the wild in the way people interact with wildlife around the world," says Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance in New York City, a group that researches the origins of pandemics."That's where we need to be focused if we want to really do something about preventing the next pandemic."Many questions remain about how, exactly, the coronavirus known officially as SARS-CoV-2 began to spread in people.
That raises the first coincidence that would be needed for SARS-CoV-2 to come out of a laboratory: Scientists would have to find it in nature first."Most of the viruses [carried by bats] actually probably don't even have the capacity to infect humans," says Anthony. So scientists collecting field samples would, in some sense, have to win the lottery to collect a coronavirus that happens to be highly transmissible in humans.
These protocols are used by scientists all over the world, including in China. Mazet says that the staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where much of the suspicion has been focused, has been trained by U.S. scientists as part of the PREDICT program. Scientists working there follow the rules, Mazet says.
In the case of a 2003 incident in Singapore, a student became infected with SARS after his samples were cross-contaminated with live virus. That virus was being grown in relatively large quantities in the lab for studies on the disease, and the student was not properly trained in safety procedures for the lab he was working in.
"We're fragmenting habitats. We're building roads through most regions of the world. We're incrementally destroying the large landscapes that animals have to live in," says Raina Plowright, professor of epidemiology at Montana State University and principal investigator of the Bat OneHealth research group.
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