About 60,000 years ago, a human had a sexual encounter with a Neanderthal. Now, a genetic scientist has claimed that this single sexual act caused the deaths of up to a million people during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As of June 12, 2022, 12:26 GMT, the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak had killed 6,331,211 people. Now, an English scientist has published research into the effect of the genetic differences between the lungs of Covid sufferers. His results, published in Nature Genetics , suggested that just one single “romantic liaison” about 60,000 years ago, between a Neanderthal and a human, caused up to a million deaths during the recent pandemic.
At the recent Cheltenham Science Festival , Professor James Davies, associate professor of genomics at Oxford University’s Radcliffe Department of Medicine, said one of these genes (LZTFL1) “caused a common genetic quirk that makes lungs susceptible to infection.” The researcher concluded that the offending LZTFL1 gene was passed along in “a single interspecies relationship and a single child,” that led to hundreds of thousands, and up to a million, Covid deaths.
LZTFL1 causes cells to produce too much of a certain protein on the surface of some people’s lungs. Coronavirus latches onto this protein enabling the disease to spread through the lungs more readily, which can be deadly.
