Commentary on Lethal pneumonia cases in Mojiang Miners (2012)

Commentary article to the original article

Recently, the Chinese government has rejected the proposal of a second probe by the World Health Organization to investigate the origins of SARS CoV-2. Biden administration ordered a ninety-day intelligence probe in the same which would soon end. It is highly critical for investigators worldwide to look at the clues regarding the origins of this virus that are already present. We had published one such vital clue linking a mine in Mojiang, Yunnan, to the WIV, Wuhan, where the SARS-CoV2 outbreak started (Rahalkar and Bahulikar, 2020a). In 2012, six people cleaned an abandoned bat-infested mineshaft in Tongguan, Mojiang, Yunnan, and suffered from severe pneumonia followed by death in three of them. Zhong Nanshan, the renowned doctor in China, had remotely observed the serious cases and had diagnosed pneumonia to be of primary viral origin. WIV was invited to inspect the bat coronaviruses as SARS-like bat coronaviruses were suspected to be the culprits as per a Master thesis by a medical student who studied the cases (Xu, 2013). WIV collected several samples from this mine, of which one was a SARS-like coronavirus, RaTG13, the original name being Ra4991.  However, Shi Zhengli did not explain the relationship between the mine, RaTG13, and the details of pneumonia in any of her papers till July 2020, where she explained that TG was Tongguan mine (www.sciencemag.org, Zhengli Shi Q and A). We published first a pre-print and then a detailed perspective article connecting all these dots and highlighted the features of lethal pneumonia, which resembled COVID-19 (Rahalkar and Bahulikar, 2020b; a).