Antibodies to the novel coronavirus have been found in blood specimens from September 2019 in Europe, ahead of the pandemic in Wuhan, China, signaling an “enormous” shift in how the government’s approach to the virus should be perceived, according to a top medical professor.
In a statement, Stanford medical professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said that COVID-19 antibodies were found in preserved blood specimens from September and November 2019 examined in France (read below) and Italy, disproving original media reports that the virus had originated in a Wuhan wet market.
“The implications are enormous,” Bhattacharya added, emphasizing that the virus had been in the community “long before the official start date, it was too late to stop the disease from spreading.”
“We have wasted 2 years on lockdowns for nothing,” he charged.
Both the Italian and French studies, according to the outspoken scholar, demonstrate that “early circulation of SARS-CoV-2” was widespread across Europe’s “major international travel hubs” considerably earlier than previously anticipated. Positive samples were identified in asymptomatic people, according to the study.
“Although dedicated surveillance and contact tracing did not identify local transmission before the second half of February in Europe, there is accumulated evidence that SARS-CoV-2 circulated in early January 2020 in the East of France and environmental studies suggest that the virus could have been present in December 2019 in Northern Italy,” the French researchers stated.
Given that the virus has been present in the European population since at least September 2019, Bhattacharya believes that U.S. statistics from April 2020 indicating a three percent frequency of the virus amongst adults in Los Angeles County, California, is “not so surprising.”
Read the document below:
Covid-Antibodies-Discovered-In-Blood-Samples-From-Before-The-Outbreak