Researchers at the Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences of China have claimed that coronavirus may have originated in India or Bangladesh amid heatwave.
The research, entitled ‘The Early Cryptic Transmission and Evolution of Sars-Cov-2 in Human Hosts’, challenges general orthodoxy among scientists that the virus originated in the wet markets of Wuhan.
Instead, the researchers claimed their evidence points to virus emerging in Bangladesh, the USA, Greece, Australia, India, Italy, Czech Republic, Russia or Serbia.
However, scientists around the globe have highly disputed this theory and is seeing this research as part of a Continuous process by the Chinese regime to to shift the blame from Wuhan.
The research, led by Dr Shen Libing, claimed the virus likely originated in India in summer 2019 - jumping from animals to humans via contaminated water - before travelling unnoticed to Wuhan, where it was first detected.
According to the research, the traditional approach to tracing the origin of coronavirus strains did not work as it used a bat virus discovered in Yunnan, southwest China, several years ago.
But David Robertson, and expert from Glasgow University, called the paper 'very flawed' and concluded 'it adds nothing to our understanding of coronavirus'.
It is not the first time that Chinese authorities have pointed the finger of blame elsewhere - suggesting, largely without evidence, that both Italy and the US could be the site of the original infection.
The researchers propose that India’s young population, extreme weather and drought created the necessary conditions for the virus to jump to humans.
The researchers write: “Our result shows that Wuhan is not the place where human-to-human SARS-CoV-2 transmission first happened."
It adds: “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.”
It is worth noting that the findings are still a preprint and are yet to be peer reviewed- so should not be seen as established conclusions.
Indian scientists have also challenged the findings of the Shanghai study.
Mukesh Thakur, a virologist working with the Indian government, told the South China Morning Post the conclusions were a “misinterpretation”.
