It is a known fact that Coronavirus first hit the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019asit was confirmed as early as January 19. Soon it was declared a pandemic and the world was warned about its unpredictability, though China overpowered it in weeks with unprecedented lockdown measures. However, the blame game about the origin of Coronavirus continues as a number of theories claim that the virus already existed in the world.
In this grim scenario, President Donald Trump continues to chide away the dangers associated with Coronavirus that also reflected poor American response including delayed testing and a failure to acquire protective equipment.
Despite the fact, the WHO sounded early alarm declaring a public health emergency, the two memos circulated in the White House in late January and late February, authored by President Donald Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro, show the Trump administration was well aware of the looming spread of Coronavirus. The warnings were clear: The “risk of a worst-case pandemic scenario should not be overlooked,” Navarro’s memo dated January 29 had cautioned.
A week before, on January 22, Trump reportedly had told CNBC, “We have it totally under control” and “It’s going to be just fine.” Trump had continued to take it lightly for more than six weeks. “We’re talking about a much smaller range” of deaths than from the flu, Trump had stated in early March.
In the face of the deadly pandemic when the world leaders needed to devise a united strategy and accelerate efforts for effective treatment precluding the coming events led Mr. Trump the focused changed to allegations and counter-allegations whether the COVID-19 was produced in a lab or it is a natural phenomenon is still shrouded in mystery as to when and where the pandemic first originated.
The top US health expert Dr. AnthonyFauci, 79, who has served six presidents since 1984 has been criticized and marginalized by President Trump for the difference of opinion on Coronavirus. “We’re in the middle of a crisis with regard to a pandemic.” “This is what I do. This is what I’ve been trained for my entire professional life and I’ll continue to do it.“I have not been misleading the American public under any circumstances.”
Microsoft founder Bill Gates has also been critical of US policy, saying it is still struggling to contain the spread of the Coronavirus. Two of the main issues, he says, are a failure to shut down and a lag in testing capabilities.
President Trump, however, failed to substantiate his repeated assertions that the Coronavirus was produced in a lab in China but contrarily it has been found that the virus was already there in the US. According to solid reported evidence, Mary Ellen Ralph, 66-year old, living now happily in Crystal River, Florida, was infected with Coronavirus last July and luckily survived. Initially, diagnosed as pneumonia with ground-glass lung images and upper respiratory symptoms — all manifestations matching with those of COVID-19 and later confirming it. There were another three similar cases in the neighboring county Ocala from June to August last year EnnaMaulseed, Judy Marie McIntosh, and Dean Harris but, unfortunately, none survived.
All these add up to one conclusion: Florida was where the virus began in mid-2019. The only question is whether this was covered up or simply neglected. However, it was until March 1 when Florida announced its first two cases of the novel coronavirus. But buried in data recently published by the Florida health department is an intriguing revelation: The spread of COVID-19 in Florida likely began in January, if not earlier. Of them, 40 percent had no apparent contact with someone else with the virus. The majority had not traveled.
“That’s community spread,” said Eric Toner of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “It’s invisible, it’s invisible, it’s invisible, until it’s suddenly obvious.”“Many of us have long suspected that there were undetected cases in the US long before we had our first confirmed case,” Toner said. The new data “helps to explain what appeared to be a sort of explosive outbreak out of nowhere.”
While the Wall Street Journal says medical examiners across the country are now investigating possible COVID-19 deaths in the United States from as far back as November.
Many people who contacted the virus may not show up in the state data because they were never tested. However, when Thais Tepper of Chokoloskee came down with a fever, cough and shortness of breath in late January, she said the illness was unlike anything she had experienced before. Tepper, 67, said she blacked out once and felt “fizzing” in her lungs when she took breaths and later it was diagnosed as acute bronchitis.
The disease spread to Tepper’s adult son, who is autistic and lives with her at their home. It also spread to one of her neighbors, who was helping the family, she said.
After her illness, Tepper said she began to suspect she may have had COVID-19. But testing for the novel Coronavirus did not become available in Collier County until March 11, she said, and by then the active virus was no longer in her body.
In April, though, Tepper signed up for an antibody test at Interlab, the result was positive for the long-term antibody. Tepper believes she contracted Coronavirus in Kendall in mid-January, when she and her son stopped to eat at a fast food restaurant after spending the day at a preserve park where, “we made no contact with other humans,” she said.
Meanwhile, The Lancet published a paper written by a large group of Chinese researchers from several institutions challenged the hypothesis that the virus spread globally through Wuhan seafood market. In the earliest case, the patient became ill on December 1, 2019, and had no reported link to the seafood market, the authors report. “No epidemiological link was found between the first patient and later cases,” they state.
The Oxford scientist’s story also hinges on the Spanish sewage study. Dr. Tom Jefferson from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM) had told The Guardian that the virus may not have come just from China. This could uncover new transmission routes, including the sewage system and shared lavatories. CEBM Director Prof. Carl Heneghan also supports these ideas.
Dr HassanArooj, a health expert and a senior official associated with Pakistan’s Health Ministry says, “Since decades biological warfare is continuing and things like viral transmission are not new. However, with regard to COVID -19 so far there is no solid evidence that Coronavirus was produced in a lab or it got leaked.” Moreover, he says things are now unfolding and there is a solid evidence that the virus did exist in the world before it surfaced in Wuhan.
While Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called such speculation part of fake news surrounding the Coronavirus, while other public health officials said they belong with the slew of conspiracy theories claiming that the virus was engineered as all scientists who have studied the genome of the virus agree that would be impossible.
There have also been reports of Coronavirus being found in samples in Barcelona dating from March 2019, Italy in December, and Brazil in November, but these studies are yet to be peer-reviewed. Researchers from the University of Barcelona say they detected the viruss in sewage samples collected in the Spanish city on March 12 last year. That’s several months before the first cases that would lead to the current pandemic were officially identified in Wuhan, China in early December.
It gets further support as in the recent video posted by the People’s Daily, Robert Redfield, Director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, when asked whether there may have been deaths attributed to influenza that could actually have been the result of COVID -19, Redfield responded in the affirmative: “Some cases have been actually diagnosed that way in the United States today.”
Pakistan’s leading expert and Advisor to the government on science and technology Dr. Atta-ur-Rehman says that several theories are abound including the leakage of virus at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases located at Fort Detrick in Maryland and the American ‘athletes’ participating in Military World Games in Wuhan in October last year sans any worthwhile performance raises doubts about their role in transporting virus there. Dr Atta says, “All these theories need evidence, so far there is no second opinion but it is a natural phenomenon. However, the virus was already present in the world even in the US.”
The argument gets further strengthenedas reportedly Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s deputy national security adviser had asked intelligence agencies in January to look into the idea of a Wuhan lab leak, The New York Times reported. But CIA officers didn’t find any evidence.
According to Jonna Mazet, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Davis, who has worked with and trained WIV researchers in the past, says, “I know that we worked together to develop very stringent safety protocol, and it’s highly unlikely this was a lab accident.”
Despite any evidence the blame game led by the US continues with the sole purpose of maligning China. The fact of the matter is that almost every economy has felt the tremors of Coronavirus and Beijing is no exception. Thus, all the arguments stand meaningless that Coronavirus was man-made disaster, however, this impression can be wronged only with concrete evidence!
At a time when the world is still bearing the brunt of the pandemic and it necessitates that all the affluent nations need to join hands, first to counter this disaster and secondly work for a peaceful and better world taking along the weaker nations.
Learn more about COVID-19!