Yesterday, March 25, circulated on social media, and then was commented on by all media a 2015 Rai3 Leonardo video about a virus created in the laboratory which could have been the cause of the current pandemic supported by Sars-Cov-2. If to an eye with a minimum of experience the relationship between that virus and the current one could appear immediately improbable or at least very unlikely, understandable that the majority of people could instead insinuate atrocious doubts. We then asked to Roberto Burioni, professor of Microbiology and Virology at the San Raffaele Life-Health University of Milan, to explain well what are the differences between these two viruses and why we can say with certainty that they have nothing to do with each other. Here is his answer.
Because surely not the virus of the video
To anyone who knows a minimum of obvious virology that the 2015 scientific work to which the video refers, and that it was a beautiful work, published in Nature, has nothing to do with the virus that emerged in 2019. What the researchers did in 2015 was to take a mouse coronavirus by putting a piece of bat coronavirus into it (but the virus scaffold remained that of the mouse) to demonstrate the danger of these viruses and to try to understand in vitro the mechanisms by which they can pass from animals to humans and, above all, to study the possibility of developing effective vaccines valid for all coronaviruses. Knowing the sequence of a virus, e we know the sequence of Sars-Cov-2, It is possible to establish exactly where it comes from and we know it comes from the bat and not from the mouse, as was the laboratory one. And over time, when we have multiple sequences available, we will also be able to establish the moment in which the virus passed to humans and when and from where it arrived in Italy. This type of study is called Molecular Clock Analisys and it is what made us understand in the past, with certainty, not with probability, that the HIV virus passed from monkeys to humans at the beginning of the 1900s, spread locally in Africa, then moving on to Haiti and from there to the western world. So we can say with certainty that the virus is circulating completely naturally and that it has absolutely nothing to do with what was created in the laboratory with mouse coronavirus in 2015.
The danger of fake news
At this moment Burioni adds, we still do not have a therapy and a vaccine against this virus, which is very contagious and which gives a syndrome whose gravity is now under everyone’s eyes. Disinformation has done and does terrible damage because at this moment the only thing we can count on, in addition to the dedication of the healthcare staff, the behavior of citizens, who must be made responsible, and this can only be done with serious and correct information . In the past there have been people who have irresponsibly said that this infection was a trifle and that it would go away in a couple of weeks. Statements like these have led people, and even some politicians, to underestimate the problem: everyone went around, everyone went skiing when the schools were already closed and the result of those behaviors contributed significantly to the dramatic situation and to the thousands of deaths last week. Moreover we know that men believe what they want, and someone told him what they wanted to hear. For it was a dangerous lie. Therefore, each of us is called now more than ever to feel the responsibility of what he affirms, and what circulates his social networks. Starting with the doctors of course, but also as individual citizens. Everyone must ask themselves what credibility an information that arrives, for example, on Whastapp can be asked and, in doubt, whether it is appropriate to repost it, to spread it. Fake news is like the virus, the more they circulate the more they infect and the more damage they do. If in doubt, better stop them. Journalists, who are first called to select sources, deserve a separate reflection. A journalist who circulates dubious information, without having first verified it, has enormous responsibility. Control of sources should be the first duty of a journalist, not just a scientific journalist. Sorry to see that highly experienced professionals put dangerous nonsense and reliable scientific sources on the same level: it is only the latter that will save our lives, the others can sometimes do enormous damage, which in circumstances such as the one we are experiencing also translate into deaths . Everyone has to take responsibility.
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