- In 2015, the Leonardo program, broadcast on RAI, devoted a report to an experiment carried out in a laboratory.
- The experiment involved a virus different from Covid-19.
- This verification request was sent to us by a reader.
Why does a report broadcast in 2015 on Italian television resurface on YouTube? Posted on March 27 on a French-language channel with the title “A coronavirus created in the laboratory”, it has accumulated nearly 110,000 views since.
The report relates to an experiment carried out on the SARS virus, which prevailed in 2003 and which belongs to the family of coronaviruses, like Covid-19. "It's just an experience, but it raises many concerns," said the presenter of Leonardo, a program devoted to science and broadcast on RAI, the Italian public audiovisual. A group of Chinese researchers has grafted a protein from bats into the Sars virus - acute pneumonia - taken from mice. The result is a super virus that could strike humans. The presenter immediately added that the virus "is confined in a laboratory".
The report was relayed by Matteo Salvini, former Minister of the Interior and member of the League, on March 25.
🔴‼ INCREDIBILE !!!‼ 🔴
Da Tgr Leonardo (Rai Tre) del 16.11.2015 servizio su un supervirus polmonare Coronavirus creato dai cinesi con pipistrelli e topi, pericolosissimo per l'uomo (con annesse preoccupazioni). (1/2) pic.twitter.com/QuLG07XdAt
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The RAI report alluded to a study published in 2015 in the journal Nature Medicine . Carried out by researchers from the University of North Carolina, the Harvard School of Medicine and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the study looked well at a virus created using the method described in the report.
"The current virus is completely different from the Sars virus [which raged in 2003] and the study virus," Antonio Lanzavecchia, one of the researchers who participated in the study. The Covid-19 and the 2015 virus "are completely different," he says, particularly in their sequence.
Covid-19 "is not a laboratory construct or a purposely manipulated virus"
In a note added to the 2015 study on March 30, the publisher said, "We are aware that this article is used as the basis for unverified theories that the new coronavirus that causes Covid-19 has been made. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the likely source of this coronavirus. "
A study on the origin of Covid-19 published on March 17, 2020 in the same review concluded that this new virus "is not a laboratory construction or a virus manipulated with design".
Olivier Schwartz, head of the virus and immunity unit at the Institut Pasteur, also recalled that scientists are able to distinguish if a virus has been manipulated in the laboratory by analyzing its sequence. "We now know how to analyze very precisely [the sequences], by creating phylogenetic trees," he said on March 11 with France Info. We can trace the origin of a virus and we know, in the case of this coronavirus [Covid-19], that it comes from a virus which is present naturally in certain animals, in certain bats and also in the pangolin. In these animals, the virus can be found identical to 90 or almost 98% homology. There, we know that the virus has passed directly from the bat or pangolin to humans. "
This was also reminded daily by La Repubblica Fausto Baldanti, professor at the University of Pavia: "A natural virus and a virus created in the laboratory stand out perfectly", before adding: "The experience of 2015 took place before everyone's eyes. The genome of this microorganism has been published in its entirety. And this one is not the same as the current coronavirus. "
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