Latest COVID-19 Theory That SARS-CoV-2 Had Been Subjected To Serial Passaging Enhancement Processes-Fake News And Misinformation Or Plausible?

Latest COVID-19 Theory: We at Thailand Medical News typically avoid any kind unsubstantiated claims or theories and ‘cooked up’ studies and in fact we have been amused at the quality of misinformation that there is on the internet and some even perpetrated by health organizations, regulatory bodies, pharma giants, medical researchers and governments  using phenomenal resources and monies to even rope in the American media and social media platforms in elaborate scams to make claims that toxic drugs such as chloroquine, hydroxychloriquine, remdesivir, tocilizumab and favipiravir etc is able to treat COVID-19! ( we are not going to go into details there are tons of real credible studies and materials on our site and on other online sites that explains why.)


 
Then off course there are the stupid claims that 5G is causing the COVID-19 pandemic or that some African voodoo doctor has created a cure for COVID-19 or worse, that it some conspiracy by the U.S. Democrats and business elites to control people or about Bill Gates’ fetish with implanting humans with chips using the vaccine to boost sales of his upcoming ‘Windows 19.’
 
However there is a new theory that is abuzz on numerous online media that is proving to be interesting but needs more evidence to substantiate the claims https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/a-proposed-origin-for-sars-cov-2-and-the-covid-19-pandemic/ and that theory is coupled with  virus enhancing process known as ‘serial passaging.’
 
This new theory is that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was really leaked from the Wuhan laboratory in China but that prior to being leaked, the SARCoV-2 coronavirus went through not a straight forward technical genetically manipulation process but rather a method known as “serial passaging’ which allows the virus to go through a process that mimics natural evolution but is actually a carefully laboratory acceleration process of enhancing viruses.
 
This new theory is gaining traction due to new emerging materials. The new data also show that the coronavirus actually jumped directly from the bats to humans without any intermediate animals except for the Chinese researchers at that laboratory who were conducting experiments on that virus.
 
The new theory starts with fact that the Bat coronavirus  BtCoV/4991 or RaTG13 coronaviruses are the closest relative of the SARS-CoV-2(almost identical in terms of genetic material to the tune of about 96.00 %) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-0771-4 and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7
 
In late April 2012 there was a reported incidence that six miners at the Mojiang Mine fell ill with unknown pneumonia. The mine was infested with horseshoe bats that carried the RaTG13 Bat coronavirus.
 
It was reported that these miners were brought to Kunming University Hospital in Yunnan, which is about 250 km from the mine. Their symptoms include dry cough (all patients), sputum (all), high fever (all), difficulty breathing (5), myalgia (5), low blood oxygen levels (4), headaches (3), and blood clots (2). Treatments used were steroids (all), antivirals (5), ventilation (3), and blood thinners (2). And half of the miners (3) died in the end.
 
It was deemed that the miners had contracted a mysterious illness. (Wu et al., 2014). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4036791/
 
The incidence was described in a Chinese Master’s thesis written in 2013 by a doctor who supervised their treatment.  https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6981198-Analysis-of-Six-Patients-With-Unknown-Viruses.html
 
Interesting, it was recorded that bio samples (at least blood and thymus tissues) from the miners were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to determine the causative agent. The conclusion made was that “the unknown virus lead to severe pneumonia could be the SARS-like-CoV from the Chinese rufous horseshoe bat,” wrote the authors. Hence the miners could have had a coronavirus infection.
 
Also in that same year, Dr ZhengLi Shi, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, led a surveillance study at the same Mojiang Mine. Her team collected fecal swabs from 276 bats. Using genetic sequencing, they detected nine coronaviruses species, of which six were never classified and one was RaTG13. (note that that RaTG13 is a bat sarbecovirus that is 96% identical to SARS-CoV-2). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7
 
It was said that some of these coronavirus species had likely infected the miners, although no comparative studies have confirmed this. Such events are not at all new as bat-to-human spillovers of viruses had occurred before. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/
 
Although RaTG13 is the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2, a 4% genomic difference is still too vast, which requires at least 20–50 years of evolution. Hence, an intermediate host is likely involved, as was the case of SARS and MERS, because coronavirus evolution rate speeds up in a different species. https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/expert-reaction-did-covid-19-come-from-a-lab-in-wuhan
 
It is also assumed that the RaTG13 coronavirus may have may have evolved and mutated slightly while being in the miners’s bodies as coronaviruses normally evolved or mutate each time they are in a new host.
 
Note that samples (blood and thymus tissues) from the miners were sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for research purposes. As their labs were under construction at the time of sample collection, virologists may have stored these samples and only begun experimentations in 2017 or 2018.
 
The later part of the theory regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2 concerns gain-of-function research. Laboratories around the world had intentionally made microbes adapt to different species through serial passaging experiments to study the possibility of epidemics. Hence, a possibility exists that SARS-CoV-2 was cultured (or passaged) in laboratory settings to improve its binding affinity to the ACE2 receptors.
 
This theory also helps explain the uncanny rapid adaptability of SARS-CoV-2 to humans.
 
Hence the theory that the Chinese could have enhanced the virus ability and the virus must have subsequently leaked from the lab either accidentally or deliberately.(the later seems more accurate as it could have been cultivated as some kind of biological weapon specifically targeted at the US and its allies due to the mounting trade war that he US was initiating. Also it is surprising that despite the initial outbreaks in China which could have been staged at the expense of the Chinese people, China did not suffer a massive impact compared to US or Europe or Middle-east or India. )
 
Lab-leaked microbes have happened many times around the world. According to USA Today, over 1100 lab accidents involving the escape of bacteria, viruses, or toxins to agriculture or humans were reported to federal regulations between 2008–2012. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/17/reports-of-incidents-at-bioterror-select-agent-labs/14140483/
 
Interestingly a 2009 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine admitted that the re-emergence of the 1977 H1N1 swine flu pandemic  that disappeared from the human population in 1957  was “probably an accidental release from a laboratory source.” https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmra0904322
 
Furthermore it was reported that the SARS had escaped from labs six times one in Singapore, one in Taiwan, and four in Beijing. So it is not surprising that coronaviruses had leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as well. https://thebulletin.org/2014/03/threatened-pandemics-and-laboratory-escapes-self-fulfilling-prophecies/
 
It must also be noted that the Wuhan Institute of Virology received two official warnings from American embassy officials in 2018 concerning inadequate laboratory safety measures. https://www.voanews.com/covid-19-pandemic/chinese-lab-checkered-safety-record-draws-scrutiny-over-covid-19
 
Its own Chinese national team has also found that the Wuhan lab did not meet federal standards in five categories. There were also reported accidents that lab workers got wounded from bat’s attack or exposed to bat urine.
 
One is a peer-reviewed research paper in Bioassays in August, titled “Might SARS‐CoV‐2 Have Arisen via Serial Passage through an Animal Host or Cell Culture?.” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.202000091 highlights the fact that the novel coronavirus might have gone through some kind of enhancing process.
 
Another interesting commentary by Dr Birger Sørensen, a Norwegian virologist specializing in HIV vaccine research, and his colleagues aloso highlights this possibility. https://www.minervanett.no/corona/the-most-logical-explanation-is-that-it-comes-from-a-laboratory/361860
 
This theory does not contradict the fact that SARS-CoV-2 is not genetically manipulated. Serial passaging mimics natural evolution in an accelerated fashion in the lab, so it does not count as direct genetic engineering or human-designed virus.

We at Thailand Medical news after perusing through thousands of research studies and reports on the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and also learning of new emerging studies showing the effects that the  virus can cause in terms of long term health complications and the processes behind them somehow also think that this theory that the coronavirus went through a serial passaging process to enhance the virus in a number of ways is highly plausible as its unlikely that the virus  just merely evolved to attack and damage the human host in a variety of complex but well-structured pathways and also selectively without any kind of outside intelligence at play.
 
More researchers and experts should seize on the opportunity to research this theory and if there is more evidence to confirm it all, China should be punished very severely by the rest of the world for the mess that it has caused the world and the millions of lives overturned and deaths caused. Countries should not depend or trust any reports of investigations by the WHO as it the least reliable or credible agency at the moment and its Director General, an Ethiopian national cannot the least be trusted considering how he handled the crisis from the beginning and allowed the global spread of the disease including opposing travel bans and border closures and his constant praises for the Chinese government. Its little wonder that he is still allowed to speak and that stupid media and stupid people are still paying any attention to that individual.
 
Readers are advised that this is just a theory and is not totally proven and warrants detailed research and investigations.
 
For Latest COVID-19 Theories, check out other online media as this is the only piece that Thailand Medical News is covering.