Was the coronavirus made in a Wuhan lab?

Like the virus whose origin it purports to explain, the following conjecture refuses to die: The novel coronavirus was cooked up in a Chinese lab and either escaped or was intentionally released.To get more news about coronavirus wuhan, you can visit shine news official website.

It’s a claim without the support of any publicly available evidence. It implies that tight-lipped members of a large and malign network colluded to engineer the COVID-19 pandemic or to cover up an accident that caused it.

The story has all the earmarks of a conspiracy theory. And it has drawn support from the highest levels of the U.S. government.

By contrast, strong and widely available evidence supports a very different hypothesis about the virus’s origins: It evolved naturally.

Laboratory releases of dangerous viruses are not unheard of. In 2003, for instance, the virus responsible for SARS sickened a graduate student who worked in a Singapore lab a few months after the outbreak had ended there.

But there is nothing to indicate a similar breach touched off the current pandemic.Scientists believe the direct ancestor of the coronavirus now known as SARS-CoV-2 has lived for so long in bats and other animals that it is no longer capable of making them sick. At some point near the end of 2019, the virus’s genetic code mutated in a way that allowed it to jump from its animal “reservoir” to its first human host.
At the time that leap was made, the virus had recently developed — or soon would develop — the ability to spread easily from human to human. The result is a global pandemic that has sickened at least 3.9 million people and caused more than 274,000 deaths.

Scientists cite several layers of evidence to support their surmises. Though they acknowledge gaps where further research would strengthen their position or shift their reading of the exact path the virus has taken, they are firm on where the evidence ultimately leads.

Here’s how a team of biologists, infectious disease researchers and biosecurity experts put it in a report published in the journal Nature Medicine: “We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”To reach that conclusion, the authors drew on research that compared the genetic signatures of three sets of viral samples. The first were drawn from Chinese patients who became sick late last year with unexplained pneumonia; the second came from bats living near Wuhan, China, and which were sometimes brought to an open-air market for sale; and the third was from pangolins, mongoose-like animals from Malaysia that were known to have been illegally imported into China.

The analysis revealed a direct family relationship among the three. Bats were the likely origin of the coronavirus that appeared in Wuhan patients, but the virus neededed to undergo some key genetic shifts to infect humans. Mysteriously, many of the required changes were found in the more distantly related viruses from pangolins.

With an improbable amount of luck, a coronavirus might take on the mutations needed to infect humans while being cultured in a lab, the researchers conceded. More likely, nature simply made that jump once in the pangolin, and somewhere in the vast diversity of unsampled bat species, it appears to have done so again.

Meanwhile, other researchers who sifted through the genetic sequences of dozens of preserved viral samples found that the new coronavirus is a distant cousin of the coronavirus that caused the SARS outbreak of 2002 and 2003, and the coronavirus that gave rise to MERS in 2009. The virus responsible for COVID-19 has distinctive features that separate it from its predecessors by many, many generations, according to their report in the Journal of Virology.