Covid-19 has ‘no credible natural ancestor’, claims new research
Virus created in lab and evidence found of retro-engineering, scientists say
As calls to trace the origin of the SARS-COV-2 virus grow around the world, a new study, conducted by British professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr Birger Sorensen, claims that the virus was created in a lab and has “no credible natural ancestor”.
The Daily Mail cited the study and reported that the virus was created by Chinese scientists who were working on a “Gain of Function” project in the Wuhan lab. The research, according to the report, claims that scientists took a natural coronavirus “backbone” found in Chinese cave bats and spliced onto it a “new spike”, turning it into the deadly Covid-19.
The study claims that it found “unique fingerprints” in Covid-19 samples, which, according to them, could have only arisen because of manipulation in a lab.
“The study alleged ‘deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data’ at Chinese labs and notes the silencing and disappearance of scientists in China who spoke out about the activities,” said news agency ANI.
The 22-page paper was published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery.
‘Gain of function” projects involve tweaking natural viruses in order to make them more infectious. They have been outlawed in the United States of America.
Sorensen said that four amino acids on the spike had a positive charge, which causes the virus to tightly cling to the negatively charged parts of a human, making the virus more infectious.
“The laws of physics mean that you cannot have four positively charged amino acids in a row. The only way you can get this is if you artificially manufacture it,” Dalgleish told Dailymail.com.
“The implication of our historical reconstruction, we posit now beyond reasonable doubt, of the purposively manipulated chimeric virus SARS-COV-2 makes it imperative to reconsider what types of Gain of Function experiments it is morally acceptable to undertake,” they wrote.
The study claims that Chinese scientists “retroengineered” the virus, in order to make it look like it evolved naturally.
“We think that there have been retro-engineered viruses created. They’ve changed the virus, then tried to make out it was in a sequence years ago,” Dalgleish told Dailymail.com.
“We have seen lab leaks and we know it’s happening. We also know from the reports we’ve seen, that coronavirus is worked on in Biosafety Level 2 or 3 labs. If they do Gain of Function in such labs, what do you expect?” he said.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has ordered aides to find answers to the origin of the virus that causes Covid-19, saying on Wednesday that US intelligence agencies are pursuing rival theories potentially including the possibility of a laboratory accident in China.
Intelligence agencies are considering two likely scenarios but still lack strong confidence in their conclusions and are hotly debating which is more probable, Biden said.
The conclusions were detailed in a report to Biden, who asked his team in March to detail whether the novel coronavirus “emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident,” according to the president's written statement.