Chinese professor Zhang Yongzhen is a hero of medicine. His photograph published on the Chinese social network Weibo, and then removed, is going around the world, in which the great virologist is lying on the floor, under a duvet, in front of the Public Health Clinical Center in Shanghai: in his post – published on Monday 29 April and then censored, according to what the English newspaper reported The Guardian – Professor Zhang said he was evicted with his entire team of researchers and was then blocked outside by the guards. The clinical center said the group of scientists had been allocated additional spaces. The real reasons for the transfer are not known.
It’s not the first time this has happened. In January 2020 the communist authorities had closed the entire institute in Shanghai, preventing the world from promptly knowing the dangers of the new respiratory infection virus, later called Covid-19, which Zhang Yongzhen and his laboratory had transcribed for the genetic code for the first time. They had discovered, due to the relationships between the viruses, that the epidemic that was affecting the city of Wuhan was Sars, the dangerous severe acute respiratory syndrome. News that the Beijing dictatorship kept hidden for weeks, causing the spread of the infection throughout the world with its silence. And everything we then experienced.
What they don’t say about Chinese viruses
On the afternoon of January 3, four years ago, the biological sample of a 41-year-old patient, admitted to Wuhan Central Hospital on December 26 for severe pneumonia, was delivered to Professor Zhang’s laboratory. From that moment, for three days, no one in the Shanghai clinical center will go to sleep again. Zhang Yongzhen (in the photo below, according to the image published on the Chinese social network Weibo) with his team, segment after segment, encodes the entire sequence of the RNA strand of the new virus. They will call it Wuhan-Hu-1, the first human coronavirus of the Wuhan strain. They don’t know that at the Wuhan Institute of Virology they preceded them by a few hours. Also because they will keep the news secret.
Professor Zhang instead records the genome of the new virus in the GenBank database, used by biologists all over the world. The title of the file, even today, demonstrates that in Shanghai they were very clear about the danger of what was happening in Wuhan: ”Coronavirus severe acute respiratory syndrome 2 Wuhan-Hu-1, complete genome”, it is written in English. Even for the Shanghai professor it is clear that this is a new Sars outbreak. It is two in the morning on Sunday 5 January 2020, when registration on the GenBank network is completed.
That same night, Zhang Yongzhen telephoned a colleague in the pulmonology department of Wuhan Central Hospital. He tells him that the virus is certainly more dangerous than seasonal flu and bird flu. Then he informs the Chinese Minister of Health and leaves for Wuhan. Where he manages to approach the managers who follow the emergency only three days later. He warns them that it is a Sars-type virus. And, equally serious, the virus is transmitted through the respiratory tract, therefore from person to person. Professor Zhang’s team delivers to the magazine on Tuesday 7 January Nature the article on the research. A total of nineteen scientists signed it. The only non-Chinese is Edward Holmes, a famous virologist from Australia who oversaw the translation into English.
What we know about the Chinese army’s experiments
Also in the article delivered to Nature the symptoms and genetic relationships of the new virus are well described: both with the Chinese bat coronaviruses and with the same coronavirus that in 2003, again in China, caused the first Sars epidemic. But the magazine kept the article on hold for almost a month. The professor also describes what the closest relatives of the new virus are. They are called ZC45 and ZXC21 (photo below), which are perhaps at the origin of the iron curtain lowered by the communist authorities over the important discovery made in Shanghai. I will understand him a few weeks later, during a long journalistic investigation into the origins of the pandemic, from which I obtained the verified information for this article.
ZC45 and ZXC21 were in fact bat viruses isolated during clumsy experiments by the Chinese army. Just as the Chinese military led the scientific committees within the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Perhaps to avoid problems, Professor Zhang does not add these details to the GenBank database files. But despite the caution, the genome of the new virus is not revealed to the world. Yet knowledge of him would be fundamental: both to understand the dangers of the infection and to start studies on drugs and vaccines.
On the morning of Saturday 11 January, Professor Edward Holmes from Australia telephones his colleague Zhang Yongzhen. He asks him why no one has yet published their research, nor the genetic code of the Wuhan virus. Despite the obvious danger.
The doubling of China-Italy flights: at the wrong time
Zhang, according to what he will tell in an interview with the American magazine Time, says he warned everyone: from the Minister of Health to the Wuhan authorities. And that China can’t do anything else. The data is already available on GenBank, but the scientific community doesn’t know it yet. Then Holmes gets permission to proceed alone. And on the scientific discussion forum Virological.org a post appears that condenses the suffering, anger and duty of every free scientist in the face of the arrogance of dictatorships: Professor Holmes publishes the genome.
January 12th is Sunday. The White House is preparing for the historic meeting between President Donald Trump and Chinese Deputy Prime Minister Liu He, for the reduction of Beijing’s duties on the export of American agricultural products. That same morning, when it is still night in Europe, a van and some white public security cars park in front of the Public Health Clinical Center, in the suburbs of Shanghai. The officers in black uniform carry the decree of the Municipal Health Commission. It’s an order: the laboratories where Professor Zhang and his team work must close. It is clear that it is a retaliation for the unauthorized publication of the genome of the new virus. They will be reopened many months later.
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The following day, January 13, 2020, Italy and China signed a historic agreement for the immediate doubling of tourist flights, even though it is now known that an epidemic is underway in Wuhan for which the cure is unknown. For Giuseppe Conte’s government it is a great achievement. ”Italy becomes the European nation with the highest number of air connections with China”, declared the Minister of Transport, Paola De Micheli. The last flight from Wuhan will land at Rome Fiumicino airport at 4.50am on Friday 24 January, when the Chinese city has already been isolated for twenty-four hours. On January 30, the first case was discovered in Italy: a couple of tourists, also from Wuhan, landed in Milan and were hospitalized in Rome. If the communist regime, starting with president-dictator Xi Jinping, had already given voice to Professor Zhang on 5 January 2020, the world would probably have taken a different direction.
