Zoe Smith, Maria Bervanakis, Tamsin Rose, David Aidone and Tiffany Bakker
Herald Sun
November 28, 2020
Chinese scientists are now claiming COVID-19 originated in India and then spread to Australia, before emerging in Wuhan in their latest attempt to shift blame for the pandemic.
According to a research paper from the Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences, the virus was present on the Indian subcontinent before the Wuhan outbreak in December, however the theory has been debunked.
The paper titled ‘The Early Cryptic Transmission and Evolution of Sars-Cov-2 in Human Hosts’ was posted on the preprint platform of highly respected medical journal The Lancet.
Headed up by Dr Shen Libing, the research claims that by counting the number of mutations in each viral strain the first outbreak of the virus can be traced to India and Bangladesh.
This was due to India’s young population and extreme weather conditions including a 2019 summer heatwave that forced humans and animals to drink the same water.
The report goes onto to claim the virus emerged in Australia, the USA, Greece, India, Italy, Czech Republic, Russia and Serbia before China.
“Our result shows that Wuhan is not the place where human-to-human SARS-CoV-2 transmission first happened,” the paper reads.
“Before it spread to Wuhan, SARS-CoV-2 has already experienced adaptive evolution during its human-to-human transmission. The positive selection sites could contribute to the different clinical features of different SARS-CoV-2 strains. Both the least mutated strain’s geographic information and the strain diversity suggest that the Indian subcontinent might be the place where the earliest human-to-human SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurred, which was three or four months prior to the Wuhan outbreak.
“Our study helps to elucidate the early cryptic transmission and evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in human hosts and provide the new thinking for the global management of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Beijing has previously said the virus originated in the US and the UK.