NEW STUDY INTO COVID-19 ORIGIN SAYS VIRUS HAS ‘NO NATURAL ANCESTOR’
Scientists tried to reverse-engineer versions of the virus to make it appear natural, a paper says
LONDON: Amid calls for a fresh probe into the origins of Covid-19, a new study has alleged that Chinese scientists created the virus in a lab in Wuhan, then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.
The Sars-CoV-2 has no “credible natural ancestor” and was created by Chinese scientists who were working on a Gain of Function project in a Wuhan lab, the Daily Mail reported on Sunday, citing a new research paper by British professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr Birger Sorensen.
The new research claims that scientists took a natural coronavirus “backbone” found in Chinese cave bats and spliced onto it a new “spike”, turning it into the highly transmissible virus that causes Covid-19.
The study has 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.
The research, reported by DailyMail.com, is expected to intensify the ongoing debate on China’s role in creating the virus that has claimed thousands of lives.
Experts and politicians in several countries have begun to contemplate the possibility that Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.
LONDON/WASHINGTON: Amid calls for a fresh probe into the origins of Covid-19, a new study has claimed that Chinese scientists created the coronavirus in a laboratory in Wuhan - the city where the disease was first detected - and then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.
The Sars-CoV-2 virus has no “credible natural ancestor” and was created by Chinese scientists who were working on a gain-offunction research in a Wuhan lab, The Daily Mail reported on Sunday, citing a research paper compiled by British expert Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Birger Sorensen.
Incidentally, gain-of-function projects, which involve tweaking natural viruses to make them more infectious, were banned in the US since the Obama years.
The new research claims scientists took a natural coronavirus “backbone” found in China’s cave bats and spliced onto it a new “spike”, turning it into the deadly and highly transmissible Covid-19.
The paper also says that researchers found “unique fingerprints” in Covid-19 samples that they say could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory.
Authors Dalgleish and Sorensen wrote in their paper that they had prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China for a year, but were ignored by academics and major journals, according to the news report.
The study alleged “deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data” at Chinese labs and notes the silencing of scientists in China who spoke out about the activities.
The research, has been obtained by The Daily Mail, could intensify an ongoing debate on whether the virus was indeed created in a lab in Wuhan and leaked from there. In the 22-page paper that is likely to be published in the scientific journal Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, Dalgleish and Sorensen claim to have concluded how Chinese scientists built the tools to create the coronavirus.
Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo on Saturday said the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was engaged in military activity alongside its civilian research.