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Head of the Tilia laboratory Soňa Peková (45) became famous in the Czech Republic thanks to two positive coronavirus tests. After the state banned testing for the presence of the virus in the body at her laboratory, she developed her own test, which attracted interest even in the USA. Recently she told Radiožurnál what she thinks about the occurrence of the infection itself. She also explained how such a virus “thinks” and how she sees the future…
Soňa Peková in the past uncovered two cases of people infected with the coronavirus and became known to the public because of it.
Shortly afterward the state forbade her to test new patients and Soňa then for a long time sought the ministry’s permission for Tilia to become one of the testing laboratories, which eventually succeeded and was granted the green light.
Various theories about the virus’s origin
Peková has lately been spoken about again, this time in connection with where the virus came from in the first place. She stated that, in her view, the coronavirus did not come from animals. That is what the World Health Organization thinks. Peková already thought at the end of January that the coronavirus would soon reach us.
At the moment she noticed the virus spreading in China and then also at the edge of Europe, she decided it would be better to prepare for testing.
“In case by any chance we were needed, so that we wouldn’t have to delay and everything would be on hand,” the scientist explained.
How the virus “thinks” She also described how such a virus “thinks.”
“A virus is a great aristocrat in how it chooses whom to infect. For example, fungi are promiscuous; they don’t care whether they land on a dog or a human. A virus evolved for millions of years together with its host. It adapted to life with it,” she explained, saying that the virus fixes on certain cells which it then attacks. It therefore selects the host and the type of cells it specializes in. According to her, it is practically impossible for a virus to jump from animals to humans when they have completely different cellular structures.
She added that coronaviruses are more likely to bother people than to cause serious disease.
“It was surprising that a malignant coronavirus with such wild properties appeared. Moreover originally from bats, which are a species very distant from humans,” said the head of the laboratory.
The truth will come out in the end
“There is a lot of fog and mystery around it, but I think that in the end it will be revealed where the truth lies,” she declared in the interview.
“I suspect that it is an artificially created virus, and not because it somehow seems that way to me. The virus behaves strangely, it does not develop good immunity, cases of reinfection are known. It has many characteristics that we have not yet seen in nature,” she added.
According to Peková, there are not many viruses of a similar type.
“The closest to it is SARS from 2003 and the second closest is the bat coronavirus. Everything else is terribly far away,” the biologist said.
“I am convinced that this did not arise by an act of nature, but by the hand of man. Maybe I have a limited imagination, but I can’t imagine a way that it could have arisen so abruptly in nature without killing the virus,” she added. She hopes the virus won’t persist She thinks the virus perhaps escaped during scientific research in the field of genetic biology, which is one theory about how the new type of coronavirus appeared in Wuhan.
She is convinced that the virus will disappear soon and is probably not built for the long term.
