Top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has urged China to release information about six labourers who fell ill after working in a mine in Yunnan province in 2012, and are now seen as a key part of efforts to find the origins of COVID-19.
WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE SIX MINE WORKERS?
Though the full biographical details of the six workers have not been released, their surnames, ages and medical records were published in a 2013 thesis written by a Kunming Medical University postgraduate student named Li Xu.
Li’s study, still available on China’s scientific paper archive at cnki.net, examines each patient’s symptoms and concludes they were victims of a “SARS-like” coronavirus contracted from horseshoe bats.
Scientists returning to the mine at the end of 2012 found samples of a pathogen that came to be known as the “Mojiang virus”, found in rats and unrelated to SARS-CoV-2. Subsequent research was unable to confirm whether it caused the miners’ illness.
Meeting minutes from discussions between Wuhan lab scientists and the WHO-China COVID-19 origins joint study team reveal lab leak concerns were referred to as “rumors,” “myths,” and “conspiracy theories.”
By David Stanway
SHANGHAI, June 9 (Reuters) - Top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci has urged China to release information about six labourers who fell ill after working in a mine in Yunnan province in 2012, and are now seen as a key part of efforts to find the origins of COVID-19.
The workers, ages 30 to 63, were scrubbing a copper seam clean of bat faeces in April 2012. Weeks later, they were admitted to a hospital in the provincial capital of Kunming with persistent coughs, fevers, head and chest pains and breathing difficulties. Three eventually died.
The mine is in Mojiang in southwest China, about 1,500 kilometres from Wuhan, where COVID-19 was first identified.