The researchers looked at the antibodies of volunteers enrolled in a lung cancer screening trial, recruited from all Italian regions, and found that over a hundred of the participants had developed coronavirus antibodies as far back as September 2019. On October 28, 2020, a study was submitted to the journal Tumori and was accepted the very next day, “which is indicative of at the very least, a very rushed peer review – maybe even no peer review,” says Worobey. “That strikes me as a little bit odd,” he says. They also devised their own primers, which are used to target specific regions of RNA, despite there being standardised primers for Sars-CoV-2 in use across the world at the time. The researchers ran three different tests, but only one came back positive. These findings raised the suspicions of Alex Crits-Christoph, a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University who specialises in bioinformatic studies of genetic datas. A study published in August 2020, conducted by Rome’s Department of Environment and Health, reported detecting Sars-CoV-2 RNA in sewage samples taken on December 18, 2019, in the cities of Milan and Turin. Other studies reporting an earlier detection of the virus in Italy have similar flaws. “It really does look like a classic false positive situation,” Worobey says. That means there might have been some virus floating around that they just didn’t know about. In the later paper, the researchers don’t say they used the same control – but they don’t explain how they got the controls they did use. That means not only that the virus was in the lab, but that it was amplified to make more of it so it could be used as a control to develop the test, says Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona. However, the researchers used a sample from a positive patient provided by a local hospital. COVID ORIGIN FREEIn the paper, Tanzi and her coauthors write that the lab was “designated as free from Sars-CoV-2”. In an earlier report from the same lead author, Elisabetta Tanzi, a professor at the University of Milan, she and her colleagues claim to find evidence of Sars-CoV-2 in a boy in northern Italy who presented with measles symptoms in November, 2019. But the approach is highly susceptible to contamination and notorious for generating false positives. To get their data, the researchers amplified tiny amounts of RNA or DNA in a sample. There’s just one problem: all of this science could be riddled with mistakes. Authorities in China have been pushing these studies as potential evidence that perhaps the pandemic didn’t even originate in Wuhan after all. In fact, there’s been a whole spate of them, and they’ve been widely covered in the media, including Chinese state media. And this is not the first study that proposes that Covid-19 was circulating in Italy long before it was ever reported in Wuhan. The findings were potentially game-changing: they would irrevocably alter our understanding of how the Covid-19 pandemic came to be, how it spread and the virus itself operated. This would mean that the virus was circulating in Italy much earlier than December 8, thought to be the date of the first known case in Wuhan. They reported the detection of evidence of Sars-CoV-2 genetic material in the samples of eleven subjects taken before the pandemic – with the earliest case going as far back as late summer 2019. Researchers had looked at samples that were collected as part of measles and rubella surveillance in Italy. The initial experiments were done using the Delta strain of SARS-CoV-2.In early August 2021, a preprint reported a potentially huge discovery. The researchers treated hamsters infected with Covid with the antiviral TIPs and then measured the amount of virus in the animals' noses daily. In the new paper, Weinberger and Chaturvedi studied whether TIPs could also reduce viral shedding - a separate question from reducing symptoms and viral load. "TIPs would be an ideal treatment because they keep learning as the virus evolves, so they could keep the problem of drug resistance in check," she noted. "Over the last few years, many of the challenges of the pandemic have been related to the emergence of new variants," said Chaturvedi. Since TIPs reside inside the same cells as the virus they target, they evolve at the same time, staying active even as new viral strains emerge. The benefit of TIPs, though, goes beyond their ability to stifle a virus inside infected cells. "This study shows that a single, intranasal dose of TIPs reduces the amount of virus transmitted, and protects animals that came into contact with that treated animal," said Gladstone senior investigator Leor Weinberger. Historically, it has been exceptionally challenging for antivirals and vaccines to limit the transmission of respiratory viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.
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