The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday that all available evidence suggests that the novel coronavirus originated in bats in China late last year and it was not manipulated or constructed in a laboratory.
U.S. President Donald Trump said last week that his government was trying to determine whether the virus emanated from a lab in Wuhan in central China.
“All available evidence suggests the virus has an animal origin and is not manipulated or constructed virus in a lab or somewhere else,” WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib told a Geneva news briefing.
“It is probable, likely that the virus is of animal origin.”
It was not clear how the virus had jumped the species barrier to humans but there had “certainly” been an intermediate animal host, she added.
Some researchers recently discovered six new coronaviruses in bats while studying how diseases can pass from animals to humans.
The scientists said the coronaviruses – found in bats in Myanmar – are not closely related to the coronavirus now affecting many parts of the world.
The research was led by scientists from the Smithsonian’s Global Health Program in Washington, D.C. The findings were recently reported in a study in the publication PLOS ONE.
The researchers said the six new coronaviruses have never been discovered anywhere in the world.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that coronaviruses “are a large family of viruses that are common in people and many different species of animals.”
The CDC adds that it is rare for animal coronaviruses to infect people and then spread among the human population.
However, there have been major disease outbreaks caused by coronaviruses in humans. Bats have been linked to some of them.
The viruses responsible for diseases SARS and MERS were linked to bats. The US CDC says the new coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, also came from bats.
Health experts estimate that thousands of coronaviruses are present in bats, with many still undiscovered.
The Smithsonian team worked with researchers in Myanmar on a project aimed at identifying new diseases that are zoonotic –meaning they can spread from animals to humans.
The project, called PREDICT, is supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Discussions around the origin of the virus have been pertinent with theories that it may have originated in a laboratory, despite all evidence pointing to SARS-CoV-2 not being human-made.
“All evidence so far points to the fact the COVID-19 virus is naturally derived and not man-made,” explains immunologist Nigel McMillan from the Menzies Health Institute Queensland.
“If you were going to design it in a lab the sequence changes make no sense as all previous evidence would tell you it would make the virus worse. No system exists in the lab to make some of the changes found.”
“The closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2 is a bat virus named RaTG13, which was kept at the WIV. There is some unfounded speculation that this virus was the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” explains University of Sydney evolutionary virologist, Edward Holmes.
Whether man-made in a laboratory or from bats, neither have offered any peer-reviewed scientific evidence to validate their competing perspectives. The world awaits. What all seem to agree upon at the moment, however, is to stem the spread of the virus and stamp it out completely.
