Covid-19 appeared in the US before Wuhan, Chinese scientists claim in new research paper

Using mathematical models, a team of four Chinese scientists has argued that the first case of Covid-19 appeared between April and November 2019 in the northeastern US, long before the outbreak in Wuhan, China.

“The calculation results show that the COVID-19 epidemic in the United States has a high probability of beginning to spread around September 2019,” says the 14-page paper published on Wednesday at ChinaXiv, a repository operated by the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The paper was authored by Zhouwang Yang, Yunhe Hu, and Zhiwei Ding from the University of Science and Technology of China, and corresponding author Tiande Guo of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The research set out to “infer the origin time of pandemic” based on “a data and model hybrid driven method.” They modeled the positive test rate to fit the actual trends and used “the least squares estimation to obtain the optimal model parameters,” before applying the “kernel density estimation…to infer the origin time of pandemic given the specific confidence probability,” according to the paper.

Officially, the first case of Covid-19 was registered in the US on January 20, 2020 – about a month after the outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The Chinese researchers, however, argue that there is a 50% probability of first cases in 11 US states and the District of Columbia prior to that – as early as April 2019 in Rhode Island and as late as November that year in Delaware.

Their sample consisted of mainly northeastern US states – Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia – with Michigan and Louisiana thrown into the mix. 

Much of the paper focuses on Maryland, the location of Fort Detrick – a US Army base used to research bioweapons during the Cold War, and now hosts the US biological defense program. Although the paper does not specifically mention Fort Detrick, multiple Chinese officials have repeatedly suggested that the virus may have come from there, as counter to US speculation that it originated from gain-of-function research on bat viruses, conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The so-called ‘lab leak’ hypothesis focuses on the funding the US National Institutes of Health provided to a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, which partnered with the WIV to conduct bat coronavirus research. 

Earlier this week, the web-based investigative collective DRASTIC published documents allegedly leaked by a whistleblower, showing that EcoHealth Alliance was asking the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for funding in 2018 to release modified viruses into bat caves in southern China, but the proposal was rejected as too risky.

The four researchers also claim that a “series of previous studies showed that the United States, Spain, France, Italy, Brazil and other countries had been attacked by the coronavirus before its outbreak in China.”

____________________________________________________________

Chief epidemiologist of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Zeng Guang, told the Global Times that the US should be the focus of the research into the origin of the deadly virus.

Dr Guang cited the slow US response to testing people during the first stages of the pandemic and alluded to the US’s potential capabilities due to the country owning numerous biological laboratories across the globe. “All bioweapons-related subjects that the country has should be subject to scrutiny,” he said, adding that only China had invited the World Health Organisation (WHO) to investigate where the virus began.

Zhao Lijian, spokesman of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said the US study is supported by similar evidence seen in international scientific journals. “It is obvious that the outbreak had multiple origins,” Mr Zhao said, citing the claims of chief Swedish epidemiologists who have suggested the virus was present in Sweden as early as November. He urged other nations to work with WHO as China has and aid attempts to figure out its origin.

Chief scientist of the European Precision Medicine Research Institute in France, Ju Liya, said in the wake of studying the genetic sequences of the viruses from patients initially affected, they found the French outbreak was caused by an indigenous virus. She said it had no links to Wuhan – where the world’s first Covid-19 case was reported – because the virus strain was so different to the infection of Chinese coronavirus patients.

She also claimed that after publishing her findings, she and her institute were silenced and shunned by the French government and politicians.

Sources:

RT, 22 Sep, 2021 https://www.rt.com/news/535572-chinese-scientists-covid-usa-paper/?fbclid=IwAR3yedHAYEkq5SwdzQ94fBul_9U6EUy_B8_8btV1T0SpMMAgBLUZedoOpH4

Global Times, 16 June 2021 https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202106/1226339.shtml