Covid-19 Natural Origin Theory

NIH Article

One of the major proposed causes of COVID-19 is rooted in a natural origin.

The virus can’t survive outside of a living organism—coronaviruses that cause severe diseases in humans usually have a natural reservoir, which is often bats. These reservoirs allow the virus to persist in nature and occasionally jump to humans or other animals, leading to outbreaks.

However, before they can cause disease in humans, they also need an intermediate host. For example, the intermediate hosts of SARS and MERS are civets and camels, respectively.

For COVID-19, however, there are two key reasons why many challenge the possibility of natural origin.

No Confirmed Natural Host confirming the Covid-19 Natural Origin Theory

Despite extensive investigative efforts, no animals have been confirmed as the natural host of COVID-19. The COVID-19 virus cannot infect bat cells directly, suggesting that bats are unlikely to be its natural host.

Peter Daszak’s publication indicates that the COVID-19 virus was not found in pangolins (scale-covered mammals) in the wild or in trade markets. Hence, they are unlikely to be the intermediate host of the COVID-19 virus. Furthermore, pangolins live remotely from humans and are unlikely to serve as intermediate hosts and again confirms the Natural origin Theory.

Uncommon animals traded at the Huanan Seafood Market, where most of the initial human cases were centered around, were initially assumed to be potential hosts of the virus. Some environmental swab samples from the market tested positive. However, no samples collected from those animals were found to carry the virus.

Unlike SARS and MERS, no animals have been confirmed as the natural host of the COVID-19 virus, despite extensive investigative efforts. Illustration by The Epoch Times, Shutterstock

Furthermore, the so-called “patient zero” and one-third to half of the first batch of reported patients had no exposure to the Huanan Seafood Market. This fact suggests that the virus may have circulated in the community before being detected at the market.

Looking back, Jesse D. Bloom from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center identified a deleted dataset containing COVID-19 virus sequences from even earlier Wuhan epidemic patients, which he recovered from the National Institutes of Health’s archived database. Bloom conducted a genomic analysis, reaffirming that the Huanan Seafood Market was not the initial source of the virus outbreak.

Even though the virus’s spike protein can infect ferrets and cats, there is no convincing epidemiological or genomic evidence that these animals contributed to the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Covid 19 has nonatural host