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He prefers to be called "The Seeker". To protect his anonymity, he communicates through Twitter handle @TheSeeker268, which has the logo of a little-known tribal art from Bankura or Birbhum in eastern India.
But this man from West Bengal, who is in his late 20s and probably from Kolkata, is mainly responsible for challenging the conventional theory that Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is a spillover from animals.
He is at the forefront of a group of amateur information seekers called DRASTIC (Decentralised Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating Covid-19) who have pointed out that the virus likely leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.
Their superlative work has now forced even the United States government to take cognisance of the matter.
In a series of e-mails to IANS, The Seeker said that he has a background in architecture, painting and film-making.
He is neither a scientist nor a scientific researcher, but an avid Internet data miner who knows how to traverse the back alleys of the Web, far beyond the well-lit places patrolled by Google, and unearth obscure documents that reveal the origins of Covid-19.
He also explained what prompted him to look beyond the conventional Chinese "animal to human" theory that the world had started to believe.
Initially, he too had bought into the mainstream media narrative that the virus had infected humans from animals at the wet market in Wuhan.
He had then tweeted: "Nobody wants to see their parents or grandma and grandpa die over a stupid virus from an exotic animal market."
But soon he became sceptical of the conventional narrative and began interacting with individuals who had begun to rip it apart.
Early last year he stumbled upon a post by Canadian entrepreneur Yuri Deigin in which he discussed the RaTG13 virus, which was revealed to the world by WIV researcher Shi Zhengli. Deigin found that the RaTG13 virus had a similar genetic make-up to Sars-CoV-2.
"He (Deigin) wondered if Sars-CoV-2 might have emerged through some genetic mixing and matching from a lab working with RaTG13 or related viruses," The Seeker told IANS.
"His post was cogent and comprehensive and I posted the theory on Reddit after which my account was suspended."
The censorship by the social media site prompted The Seeker to find like-minded individuals in Twitter groups to further explore the topic.
In no time, he was addicted to the idea of discovering the mystery behind the deadly Wuhan coronavirus.
After a lot of trial and error, The Seeker stumbled upon exactly what he was looking for: A master's thesis by a Chinese doctor at the Kunming Medical University which contained an account of six cases of "severe pneumonia caused by unknown viruses" in workers who had been cleaning an abandoned copper mine in Mojiang county in Yunnan province in 2012.
The workers' symptoms seemed eerily similar to those of Covid-19. Three of them died from the mystery illness. "It was a 60-page master's thesis in 2013 which in exhaustive detail described the conditions and step-by-step treatment of the miners," The Seeker told IANS.
"It named the suspected culprit: 'Caused by Sars-like (coronavirus) from the Chinese horseshoe bat or other bats'.
"Finding it, at that moment, felt big... like a homicide detective solving a cold case."
He dropped the link, without fanfare, on May 18 last year and followed up with a second thesis from a PhD student at the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention which confirmed much of the information in the first. Four of the miners tested positive for antibodies from a Sars-like infection and the WIV was roped in to test their samples.
Although Ms Shi accepted that they worked in the mineshaft, the researcher claimed that the three miners died due to fungal infection.
Shortly after The Seeker made the posts, Chinese authorities changed the access controls of CNKI, which is a huge database of Chinese academic journals and theses, to ensure that the two theses were never found again.
But The Seeker did not give up. He worked closely with Madrid-based data scientist Francisco de Asis de Ribera and discovered detailed plans by WIV to test the infectivity of Sars-like viruses in lab animals and human cells, carry out cross-species mutation and genetically recombine the viruses.
The Seeker found that all these were supervised by Ms Shi herself.
A majority of scientists and experts continue to believe the Covid-19 virus emerged after jumping from a wild animal to humans in or around Wuhan, where the first cases appeared in 2019. But several of them have now veered around to the thought that the pandemic began after Sars-CoV-2 leaked from the WIV and needs further investigation.
This is largely due to information provided by The Seeker and the DRASTIC team who have uncovered the fact that the WIV had an extensive collection of coronaviruses gathered over many years of foraging in bat caves.
Said The Seeker: "I have seen an overwhelming amount of facts and data that points towards a lab-leak scenario."
Indo-Asian News Service
