![]() ![]() The study was declared under investigation in March 2021 by the journal, but no corrections were ever made. “Any antibody test has its false positives, so when you screen a group of individuals in a very low prevalence situation, the majority of positives are going to be false,” says Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus Medical Center who was part of a WHO team that traveled to Wuhan to investigate the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The researchers didn’t take the necessary measures to prevent the detection of other coronavirus antibodies, such as the common cold. But others have pointed out major flaws in the paper. ![]() The paper was widely covered by English-speaking media. They theorised in interviews that they might have detected a “less transmissible” strain that could circulate without sparking a major outbreak. “Our results indicate that Sars-CoV-2 circulated in Italy earlier than the first official Covid-19 cases were diagnosed in Lombardy, even long before the first official reports from the Chinese authorities, casting new light on the onset and spread of the Covid-19 pandemic," the authors wrote. 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. In early August 2021, a preprint reported a potentially huge discovery. ![]()
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