Voices of Science fade in silence

Arkajyoti Dutta
Research Scholar, Bose Institute

With the onset of corona virus infection spreading as a pandemic disease affecting over 3.5 hundred thousand people in more than 192 countries in just three to four months, the conspiracy and anti-conspiracy theories have been looming at large in a worldwide manner. Of course the lack of vaccines and medications required for the treatment of the deadly COVID-19 virus is one of the major reasons for the rise of these conspiracy theories along with the fact that home arrested minds love to feed on gossips. Idle mind is devil’s workshop and these workshops are being fueled by electronic and social media. Every one of us loved listening to stories told by our grandparents and we believed those tales to be true with a willing suspension of disbelief until we grew up, but have we?
The most important conspiracy theory that hit us even before the corona virus is that SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 has been bioengineered. The virus was designed to be a potent bio-weapon and was to be released in the West by the Communist people of China. Well, then how on earth the disease originated in the Wuhan district of China. There are two different schools of thoughts prevailing in this regard. One believes that it was an experimental fallacy and that from the Wuhan Institute of Virology accidentally it got released when the scientists were trying to do some precarious experiments or may be some insider is responsible as shown in a famous Hollywood movie of 2002, where an employee steals the T-virus from the so called Umbrella foundation igniting the havoc. Now, the Wuhan Institute of Virology has a BSL-IV facility, which means it follows a set of biocontainment precautions and is well equipped for isolating most contagious biological agents. There are all together fifty four BSL-IV laboratories in the world including thirteen laboratories in the United States, nine in the United Kingdom and four in India. Although US government officials acknowledged in 2008 that the 1978 accidental release of the virus in cattle holding pens have resulted into the FMD virus outside laboratory facilities and similar accidents were reported as in case of H5N1 influenza virus being shipped accidentally to the US Agricultural Departmental Lab as well as the case of exposing workers to the anthrax bacillus, but these accidents have failed to cause a mass outbreak. In Asia, after the first outbreak of the SARS disease in 2003, there were three laboratory accidents reported where the final accident killed one patient. Statisticians have modeled the probability of laboratory accidents leading to an outbreak and have found that even the largest possibility could lead to only tiny accidents that can never get converted even to a local outbreak negating the probability of a global outbreak as is the case with COVID-19.

Picture Courtesy: Suvojit Bose

The other school, including radio personality Rush Limbaugh, is a staunch believer of the fact that the present corona virus is a biothreat from China to wipe out the entire economy of the US. Then the question lies how corona virus could qualify as a bioweapon with a mortality rate of less than 4% and the answer is, obviously, because like most other Chinese products the virus is also made in China. The way American President referred to the disease as the “Chinese virus” is xenophobic and racial. The virus is not Chinese it just that the outbreak began in China. The counter theory also suggests that this is just a weakened version of the actual and more potent form, and that the pharmaceutical companies already have the vaccines, which are just months away from getting dispatched. The pharmaceutical companies will be making huge profits and so the present situation is an outcome of bioterrorism. The Fox News anchor Sean Hannity declared to millions of viewers that the disease can be treated using a drug regimen including hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin and zinc sulphate without any scientific evidence, clinical trials or report of side effects. Although some anonymous doctor somewhere in New York may have treated 500 patients successfully, but spreading the news has a huge setback from scientific perspective as was seen in India, where people were found drinking urine of the Holy cow to get rid of the virus. When the world is dictated by separatists, God save its inhabitants.
The blame game continued on both sides involving Zhao Lijian, spokesperson and Deputy Director General of the Foreign Ministry of China, demanded that the US Military has designed the virus and released it in the sea food market of the Wuhan district of China. Of course, the United States was unaware of the fact that within a couple of months more than forty thousand of their own people will get affected. One Japanese group has further proclaimed that the death of 14000 people in the US was not due to influenza but because of corona virus and accused the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) for suppressing data and stated that the virus have originated in the US. However, nobody paid any heed to the fact that scientists were successful in the isolation of the virus and they were trying to elucidate pathogenicity of the COVID-19 virus.
On February 03, 2020, Zheng-Li Shi and his team from the Wuhan Institute of Virology came up with evidences that full length genome sequences of the novel virus obtained from five patients at early stage of outbreak have shown 79.6% sequence identity with SARS-CoV, the pathogen responsible for severe acute respiratory syndrome, as well as 96% sequence similarity with a bat corona virus (RaTG13) and named it 2019-nCoV, which was later on termed by the World Health Organization as COVID-19 (also known as SARS-CoV-2). Another group of scientists led by Wan Y and Li F reported that computational modeling and simulations have shown that the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the spike proteins in 2019-nCoV affects human ACE2 (angiotensin-converting enzyme 2) receptors and the mode of action is nearly similar to that of SARS-CoV. This report was validated using biochemical characterization by two different groups of virologists. The functional assessment of receptor usage and cell entry have been done by Letko M, Marzi M and Munster V of National Institute of Health, MT, USA, where as the dependence on ACE2 and TMPRSS2 have been validated by Hoffmann M and his team from Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Gottingen, Germany. The interesting phenomenon that Kristian G Andersen and her colleagues from The Scripps Research Institute, USA, have highlighted in their review article is that although there are some critical mutations that made 2019-nCoV favorable for interactions with human ACE2 receptor but there are several other mutations that are compatible but not optimal for binding ACE2. However, these non-ideal mutations gave 2019-nCoV such global acceleration rate of human to human transmission. Kristian argued that if any lab wished to prepare a bioweapon from COVID-19, it would always go for optimal mutations because non-optimal mutations have negligible chances of survival. Thus, the 2019-nCoV spike appears to be the outcome of either natural selection on humans or human-like ACE2 receptors giving rise to a new optimal solution.
Nature works in mysterious ways. We have to keep ourselves calm and do the needful to avert natural catastrophic events. Instead, we are blaming each other and engaged in the concoctions of conspiracy theories. We know that every viral outbreak originates in one species, circulates in another and ultimately affects humans. For example, the SARS virus (bats  civets  humans), Nipah virus (bats  pigs  humans), Hendra virus (bats  horses  humans) and so on. The circulating animal in this case have been speculated to be Malayan pangolins as the corona virus in these pangolins have identical six key receptor binding domains as that of 2019-nCoV. But these logical explanations are inaudible to our deaf ears as we kept on swallowing shits served in ivory plates by the social media. The conspiracy theorists need enemies to establish panic and to cover up the fact that even after 15 years of the SARS outbreak, not even the minimal efforts have been taken to develop global public health. In the world ruled by separatists, public health programs have been defunded, labor laws and health care programs were not implemented, and public sanitizations and hygiene were neglected. So, instead of admitting that we are just not prepared for such a pandemic, it is better to lead the public into conspiracy theories, blame game and chaos. Rabindranath Tagore, the great Indian poet, have rightly remarked in the poem ‘Proshno’, that “Have you ushered your mercy on them? / have you really loved them?”

(The authors view is his personal.)