(SenePlus) – According to an article published in Le Monde, five years after the appearance of the first cases of Covid-19 in Wuhan, the exact origin of SARS-CoV-2 remains a major scientific enigma. Two main hypotheses persist: transmission through wild animals or an accidental leak from a laboratory.
As the daily reports, the World Health Organization (WHO) again recently, on December 30, 2024, renewed its request for transparency from the Chinese authorities. Its director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, maintains that the two main hypotheses “remain on the table”.
The only scientific certainty concerns the bat origin of the virus. According to Le Monde, two related viruses have been identified: “RaTG13, identified in 2013 in the Mojiang mining cave” and “Banal-52, collected in Laos in 2020”, the latter presenting a genetic similarity of 96.85% with the SARS-CoV-2.
A significant advance in the market hypothesis was made by French researcher Florence Débarre, who discovered genomic data in 2023 confirming the presence of potential vector animals in the Huanan market. However, as the French newspaper points out, these data “do not allow us to affirm that they were contaminated specifically by SARS-CoV-2”.
Concerning the laboratory leak hypothesis, the newspaper reports the existence of the Defuse project, revealed by the Drastic group in 2021. This project, unfunded, planned “gain of function” experiments at the Institute of Virology of Wuhan (WIV). Jeremy Farrar, current scientific director of the WHO, privately described the situation as the “Wild West”.
Le Monde also cites a recent study by German researcher Andreas Martin Lisewski, published on December 17, revealing that “the only known sequence analogous to the furin site of SARS-CoV-2 comes from an artificial MERS virus”.
Jean-Claude Manuguerra, virologist at the Pasteur Institute and member of the WHO SAGO group, summarizes the situation: “Market metagenomic data tips the scales, but they are not likely to confirm the zoonotic origin. As for the laboratory leak, we do not have any data that allows us to evaluate this hypothesis.”
The article points out that American intelligence services remain divided on the issue, with the FBI and the Department of Energy leaning toward the laboratory accident theory, while other agencies favor the zoonotic hypothesis.
