Italian Study Doesn't Contradict Theory That COVID-19 Came From Wuhan: Researcher

An Italian medical researcher who reported finding signs of antibodies to COVID-19 in Italian patients before China confirmed its first official case of the disease on Dec. 31 have said the findings don't undermine the prevailing view that the virus originated in Wuhan. Giovanni Apolone, lead author of a study published in the INT’s scientific magazine Tumori Journal, said the fact that antibodies to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, were circulating in the Italian population prior to the first confirmed Italian case in February didn't challenge the currently prevailing view that it originated in the central city of Wuhan.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda machine has kicked into high gear on the subject of the coronavirus' origins in recent weeks, saying the virus could have come to China before tearing through the population of Wuhan and evolving into a global public health disaster.

SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have originated in bats and mutated via a second animal host -- possibly pangolins -- into a form capable of infecting humans, according to a report in The Lancet medical journal's September 2020 edition. "Everything points to a bat sarbecovirus reservoir; we are very confident about this," David Robertson, head of bioinformatics at the Medical Research Council–University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, told The Lancet.

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