If not for the investigative work of the likes of Prasenjit Ray, better known as ‘The Seeker’ on X, the world would have never known that a SARS-like virus killed mine workers in China’s Yunnan province in 2012 and a virus from that mine was a near-match for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ray and others at the collective ‘DRASTIC’, short for ‘Decentralised Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating Covid-19’, spent months scouring the internet for evidence and analysing it to answer questions that the Chinese regime should have addressed at the onset: What is this virus? Where did this come from?
If the Chinese would have been transparent, millions of people could have been saved, said Ray in an interview with Firstpost’s Madhur Sharma.
What Ray and DRASTIC found was this: In 2012, six mine workers fell sick in China’s Yunnan. They fell sick from a SARS-like virus and developed symptoms similar to Covid-19. Chinese scientists, including those from Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), made several trips to collect hundreds of samples from the mine and one of those samples had a virus that matched 96.2 per cent with SARS-CoV-2. If hiding this was not damning enough, it also emerged that WIV had renamed the sample in its databases to confuse anyone looking for it.
Five years later, Ray said the world still has not learnt lessons from the pandemic.
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