Australian Nobel laureate Peter C. Doherty, who received the 1996 Nobel Prize in Medicine, said that the epidemic prevention measures in China have worked and he has no doubts that the country will help other nations in terms of vaccination efforts to win the battle against novel Coronavirus.
The 79-year-old Doherty had written a book called Pandemics in 2012 where he predicted the development of a global pandemic and spread of infections and how to differentiate between bacteria and viruses. While speaking about his book, the Australian Nobel prize winner said the first chapter of the book on how infection and immunity works, and his recommendations could be helpful to many.
The Pandemic and The World
During an interview with the Chinese state-run news organization Global Times, Doherty was asked when the Coronavirus pandemic would end and in response, he said that it can happen only if the majority of world population receive the vaccines He said, "I expect to see vaccines rolling out in the first half of next year."
As per the report, he opposed attacking any particular country for the COVID-19 outbreak, as Coronavirus is a naturally-occurring virus, which probably has jumped to humans via an intermediate host. Doherty told the news organization that it is a global problem and "we all need to work amicably and effectively together across the science and health spectrum. That's how science operates anyway."
Despite several claims on how China dealt with the novel Coronavirus outbreak in the country and the conspiracy theories around the original COVID-19 death toll, Chinese authorities imposed strict measures in the affected cities that included city-wide lockdowns and mass testing to curb the spread of the Coronavirus inside the country.
Citing these efforts, the Australian veterinary surgeon, Doherty said that aggressive measures such as lockdowns, "augmented by diagnostic technology and contact tracing, as demonstrated at the outset in Wuhan, clearly works. Countries like Sweden that, with a well-educated community and good hospitals, have avoided doing this have not done well."
Even though the report did not reveal whether Doherty talked about Wuhan lab leak allegation or its possibility, earlier another Nobel laureate, French professor Luc Montagnier, who co-discovered HIV, claimed that the novel Coronavirus was created inside a lab and mentioned that the deadly virus had originated during the attempt to manufacture a vaccine for AIDS virus and was accidentally released.
But soon after that French authorities said that there was no evidence of a link between the SARS-CoV-2 and the work of the P4 research lab in China's Wuhan. They rejected the claim made by the Nobel winner, who made the comments during a podcast by Pourquoi Docteur and also in a TV interview.
Later, a well-known Russian Professor Peter Chumakov said the novel Coronavirus is the result of Wuhan scientists doing "absolutely crazy things" in their laboratory. He claimed that the aim of Chinese scientists was to study the pathogenicity of the virus but it was not their intention to cause a global pandemic.
