- The coronavirus, which has already killed 81 people in China, was created in 2003 in the United States, according to a widely shared Facebook post.
- To support his claims, he relies on a patent filed by the federal agency of the United States in charge of public health.
- But this document actually concerns SARS, one of the different viruses of the coronavirus family, and does not in any way indicate that it was "created" in the laboratory.
The epidemic of coronavirus appeared in mid-December in China, responsible, to date, of 81 deaths and more than 2,700 contaminations - as well as a wave of strong worries at the international level - would it actually have its origin in the United States? United ?
This is in any case what several viral posts on social networks claim, claiming to have discovered crucial information around the coronavirus. "I wouldn't want to die stupid so I researched American medical sites, I discovered that the coronavirus is not new, [that it] was created in 2003 in the USA and that strangely something should be spend this January 24, 2020! “, Puts forward a Facebook post shared almost 2,000 times and illustrated with extracts from the patent in question.
"The coronavirus is a patented American virus [...] which expires on January 23, 2020. So what better than to launch an epidemic to sell their vaccines before expiration", maintains another post with conspiratorial overtones, while quoting the same document. Leaves to confuse a strain of the coronavirus hitherto unpublished (that of Wuhan) with other strains of this family of "crown virus" - in reference to their appearance, observable thanks to an electron microscope -, which can cause symptoms mild enough (such as a cold) as much more severe cases.
FAKE OFF
If the patent put forward by these two posts does exist, it is devoted to SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), another strain of the coronavirus, which had caused more than 700 deaths between 2002 and 2003 after its appearance in China.
A simple reading of the first pages of this document dated April 2004 and patented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the American federal body in charge of public health, shows that it is there well question of this precise strain and not that which appeared last December, today known under the name of “2019-nCoV”: “We are revealing here a newly isolated coronavirus […] (SARS-CoV) the cause of particularly acute respiratory problems (SARS) ”, says the patent.
"[This document] provides the techniques and compositions useful for detecting the presence [...] of SARS-CoV in a sample and / or for diagnosing a SARS-CoV infection in a subject", clearly indicates the summary of this 72 page patent.
However, this virus turns out to be “80% similar to that of SARS”, as Professor Yazdan Yazdanpanah, head of the Infectious and Tropical Diseases Department at Bichat Hospital in Paris, recently explained to 20 Minutes.
No vaccine existing to date
And contrary to what one of the posts claims, no vaccine exists to date for "2019-nCoV".
Why did the CDC insist on patenting the genetic sequence of the virus in 2003? If their representatives had not responded to our requests before the article appeared, the CDC had justified their approach at the time, explaining that it aimed to work for public health: "The very objective of this patent is to prevent others from being able to control this technology. We [patent] it to give industry and researchers reasonable access to samples. "
The patenting of a genetic sequence of this type is however no longer possible in the United States today, since a decision rendered by the Supreme Court in 2013, according to a lawyer quoted by FactCheck.org.
World
Coronavirus LIVE: WHO corrects its assessment of the threat that goes to "high" internationally ...
Health
Coronavirus: Are these viral videos authentic?
- Medicine
- Health
- coronavirus
- Society
- World
- United States
- Fake Off