Origin of the Covid: virus created, laboratory leak, manipulation of the masses… the point after two years of spec – Midi Libre

Where does the coronavirus come from? For more than two and a half years, the Covid-19 has been the focus of all attention. But the mystery of its origin is still not fully elucidated. A look back at what has emerged over the past few months of speculation. How was Covid-19 born? For two and a half years, speculation has been going well. A scientific consensus had however quickly emerged in 2020. The Covid would be of natural origin, we are talking in particular about a virus derived from a bat. But today, this hypothesis put forward as a virtual certainty has lost ground. This Tuesday, June 6, journalist Patrick Cohen returned to the doubts that today surround this old consensus in an editorial for the France 5 program “C à vous”. Its title: “Was the virus born in nature or… in a laboratory, more precisely in an American laboratory?” The journalist returns to the various speculations formulated on the subject for two years. And in particular the assertions of Peter Daszak, American specialist in zoonoses, diseases which pass from animals to humans, but also president of EcoHealth Alliance, the NGO which financed research at the Wuhan laboratory. The reasons for a consensus Along with 26 other scientists, he published a letter in the Lancet to “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 is not of natural origin”, concluding “overwhelmingly that this coronavirus originated in wildlife.” A version widely taken up all over the world despite the absence of irrefutable proof. In a river article devoted to the subject, TF1 interprets this position adopted by the scientific and media sphere as a desire to counter “false information” and other conspiracy theories that were multiplying at the time, including some claiming that covid was a biological weapon or a virus derived from HIV. But since then, new elements have appeared. Patrick Cohen recalls in particular that Peter Daszak had collaborated extensively with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which specializes in coronary heart disease, in order to build “chimeric” coronaviruses, that is to say, which combine fragments of different viruses that we find in nature. What to conclude? A project for which the scientist put together a grant application submitted to the American authorities in March 2018. In a television interview broadcast on May 30, Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Lancet commission on covid-19, believes that “the experiment that could have created the virus is described in the grant application”. “That’s practically how to create covid that’s written into Peter Daszak’s March 2018 draft, which he never mentioned until the press revealed it.” For their part, the authors of the project answer “that they did not have their funding, which is true, and therefore that it did not happen, which remains to be proven”, underlines the journalist from France 5 From all this, it is difficult to conclude with certainty about the origin of the covid. “What is certain is that a group of scientists involved in this research have attempted to manipulate world opinion. And that risky genetic engineering research on pathogenic viruses has been carried out in Wuhan and North Carolina, without control or guarantee of security”, concludes Patrick Cohen. Far from the consensus of 2020, the scientific community is now asking for more transparency. And believes that if it is impossible to affirm that the covid is due to a laboratory leak, this hypothesis is no longer to be excluded.