Mysterious origin

Almost two years into the pandemic, there is no certain conclusion as to whether the virus is of natural origin, the product of a laboratory accident or the result of malicious manipulation. French President Emmanuel Macron is always talking about biological warfare.  

But the scientific community itself does not fully agree, there is a huge division of opinion: in March last year, the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine, Luc Montagnier, told a French television station his hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 had been created by manipulation of the HIV virus altered in some way. 

A month later, Li-Meng, a Hong Kong virologist at the School of Public Health, arrived in the United States seeking political asylum on the grounds that she was being persecuted to death by the Chinese authorities because she knew "the truth" about the coronavirus. 

The researcher gave interviews to a multitude of American media outlets claiming that it had been artificially created by the communist government to harm the world and that both the Chinese authorities and the WHO concealed the fact that it could be transmitted from person to person, something that was already known at the time because it was in the agency's own communiqués available on its website. 

Neither Montagnier, whose pabulum has been disqualified by the international scientific community, nor Li-Meng, have been able to reliably prove that the technique exists to create SARS-CoV-2 in a laboratory without leaving a cut-and-paste trace in its genetic code. 

Two leading Spanish researchers have told me exclusively that they also have no proof of deliberate manipulation, namely virologist Luis Enjuanes, recently awarded the Maimonides prize, and immunologist Alfredo Corell, distinguished with the Personaje Único prize. 

Enjuanes is director of the coronavirus laboratory at the National Biotechnology Centre and is among the 25 most notable scientists in his field in the world. He is also a close friend of Shi Zhengli, deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who has studied different species of bats and their coronaviruses.  

Within his extensive experience studying coronaviruses - almost four decades - Enjuanes explained that this pathogen has very particular modifications that give it tremendous pathogenicity and multitropism.  

What does this mean? That it has a capacity to infect many tissues and all organs, a characteristic that he finds surprising because viruses usually have a specificity of entropism. SARS-CoV-2 has more than 50 tropisms, i.e. it can infect more than 50 parts of the human body and cause more than 50 pathologies and combinations thereof.  

In turn, Corell, who is also a member of the Spanish Society of Immunology, has been warning that Covid-19 does not always behave as the models predict, which forces us to improvise on the fly with measures and recommendations.  

Is there hope? There is, and it is called vaccines, but we urgently need better management of the pandemic. By the end of 2021, according to data from Our World in Data and the Spanish Ministry of Health, 8.4 billion doses of anti-Covid vaccines had been administered globally. 

The world's population of 7.9 billion people have not all been immunised, with an unequal distribution of vials prevailing, causing it to go at different speeds. And it is hurting us all. 

While China, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Canada, the United States, Germany, Italy, Belgium and other countries apply a third booster dose of the vaccine, in continents such as Africa, protection quotas still do not even reach 40% of the population. 

The WHO reports that 56% of the world's population has at least one dose but there is still a huge human contingent left, while the Covax mechanism awaits further donations of vaccines from countries that are already providing a third dose for their inhabitants.  

In turn, vaccination for children under 11 years of age is progressing in a handful of countries such as: USA, China, United Arab Emirates, Chile, Cuba and in the 27 member countries of the European Union (EU). Even Israel has already started the fourth dose. I personally want to believe that sooner or later we will know the truth, the origin of SARS-CoV-2 will be found and that will allow scientists to have the exact tool to defeat it, because if not, we will have to wait for a series of doses of vaccines and I find that worrying.