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As reported by Metro.co.uk that In 2012 six people working at the Mojiang mine, in Yunnan province, suffered from a pneumonia-like sickness after completing a job removing bat feces.

In total three of them died after experiencing a fever, dry cough, and other symptoms linked to COVID-19 and were treated in a similar way to those who contracted the virus.

Virologist Jonathan Latham and molecular biologist Allison Wilson studied Chinese doctor Li Xu’s thesis on the incident and now claim it could have been the first occurrence of the infection.

“The evidence it contains has led us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Latham and Wilson wrote in an article published July 15 on their website, “Independent Science News.”

Researchers are trying to trace the origin of Covid-19 Photo: AP

Latham told The Post that the coronavirus “almost certainly escaped” from the Wuhan lab.

In his thesis, the physician Li Xu, who treated the miners, describes how the patients had a high fever, a dry cough, sore limbs, and, in some cases, headaches — all symptoms now associated with COVID-19, said Latham and Wilson.

How the miners were treated — for example, with ventilation and a variety of drugs including steroids, blood thinners, and antibiotics — also resembles how COVID-19 patients are being treated worldwide, they said.

After conducting multiple tests for hepatitis, dengue fever, and even HIV, the doctor consulted with various specialists throughout China, including virologist Zhong Nanshan, an international hero who managed the SARS outbreak in 2003 and is considered the country’s greatest scientist.

“The remote meeting with Zhong Nanshan is significant,” Latham and Wilson said. “It implies that the illnesses of the six miners were of high concern and, second, that a SARS-like coronavirus was considered a likely cause.”

The doctor also sent sample tissues from the miners to the Wuhan lab, a focal point of coronavirus research in China. There, scientists found the source of infection was a SARS-like coronavirus from a Chinese rufous horseshoe bat, according to the thesis.

Researchers work in a lab of the Wuhan Institute of Virology Photo: AP

Latham and Wilson believe the virus — once inside the miners — “evolved” into SARS CoV-2, “an unusually pathogenic coronavirus highly adapted to humans,” and the samples somehow escaped from the lab last year, launching what has morphed into the coronavirus pandemic.

The New York scientists labeled their COVID-19 origins hypothesis “the Mojiang Miners Passage”; “passaging” is a virologic term for adapting viruses to new species, they said.

Although scientists at the Wuhan lab had collected coronavirus samples from bats at the same mine, they missed the 2012 connection, Latham told The Post.

Reaction to the Latham-Wilson finding has been gradually gaining positive reviews from the scientific community in the US. Renowned American geneticist and molecular engineer George Church shared their work on Twitter in July. The tweet garnered 304 retweets and 403 likes. Stuart Newman, a leading expert on cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College in Westchester called it “the best-sourced explanation yet of the origins of #SARSCoV2” in a July 19 tweet about the report.

“We feel that it’s being circulated underground in the scientific community,” Latham said. “People think it has merit, but they are reluctant to go public because the coronavirus has become politicized.”

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