It's one of the greatest mysteries we've ever faced: Where did the
deadly COVID-19 virus that shut down the world come from?
As the World Health Organisation prepares to release its report
into the origins of the virus, the Under Investigation team delves
deeper into the pandemic than ever before.
The big debate over the origin of the virus, which is dividing
the scientific and political worlds, starts in a remote abandoned
copper mine in south-west China in 2012.
Unknown to the men working there at the time, the bats
populating the mine and the bat faeces they were shovelling,
contained an unknown coronavirus that would later be named
RaTG13.
Around two weeks after entering the mine the miners fell sick
with a strange flu-like illness.
Chinese medical records kept secret for years show their
symptoms were identical to COVID-19.
Three of the six infected miners died, with one lingering in
hospital for five months before succumbing to the strange illness.
So scientists began to ask: were these men the first victims of
COVID-19, eight years before it erupted in Wuhan?
"The very simple data elements on the ground all point to the
likelihood that this virus came from a lab," Dr Jonathan Latham,
the executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project in New
York, told Under Investigation.
Blood samples from the dying miners were sent to China's highest
security bio-lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Blood samples from dying miners at the copper mine in
the Yunnan Province were sent to China's highest security bio-lab,
the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (Nine)
Samples of the bat coronavirus taken from the faeces in the mine
were also taken to the Wuhan lab.
Comparison tests would later reveal it was a 96 per cent match
to COVID-19 as discovered in Wuhan in December 2019.
What was once dismissed as a conspiracy theory has become a
legitimate scientific debate. Is it possible that COVID-19 already
existed and was being researched and accidentally escaped from the
Wuhan lab, sparking the pandemic?
It is the type of research that was taking place at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology that raises eyebrows.
Raina MacIntyre, a professor of Global Biosecurity at the New
South Wales University, says the bat virus that infected the copper
miners could have been deliberately mutated into COVID-19 through
the controversial and risky research technique called
gain-of-function engineering.
Liz Hayes and the team of Under Investigation experts.
(Nine)
"The genetic engineering of a pathogen can be done in different
ways. One way of doing it's called gain-of-function research, which
is where you pass the virus through an animal host over and over
again. So you're basically speeding up nature. You're speeding up
evolution by hundreds or thousands of years," Professor MacIntyre
told Under Investigation.
Shi Zhengli, a Chinese virologist who's known as the Bat Woman
because of her work with bat diseases, has confirmed that she did
take samples of the copper mine virus to study in Wuhan.
She also confirmed that she and her team conducted
gain-of-function engineering on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan
Institute of Virology.
