Scientists planned to engineer new virus
WUHAN, U.S. TEAM
Wuhan and U.S. scientists were planning to create entirely new coronaviruses that did not exist in nature by combining the genetic code of other viruses, proposals show.
Documents leaked last month of a grant application submitted to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), reveal that the international team of scientists was planning to mix genetic data of closely related strains, and grow new viruses.
A genetics expert working with the World Health Organization who uncovered the plan after studying the proposals in detail said that if Sars-cov-2 had been produced in this way, it would explain why a close match in nature has never been found.
So far, the closest naturally occurring virus to Sars-cov-2 is a strain called Banal-52, which was found in Laos last month and shares 96.8 per cent of the genome.
Scientists expect a direct ancestor to be about a 99.98 per cent match, and none has been found so far.
The DARPA proposals, which were leaked to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group, show that the team had planned to take sequences from naturally occurring coronaviruses and use them to create a brand new sequence.
Explaining the proposal, a WHO collaborator who asked not to be named, said the team planned to “take various sequences from similar coronaviruses, and create a new sequence that is essentially the average of them ... They would then synthesize the viral genome from the computer sequence, thus creating a virus genome that did not exist in nature, but looks natural as it is the average of natural viruses.”
The proposal was submitted by British zoologist Peter Daszak on behalf of a consortium including Daszak Ecohealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the University of North Carolina and Duke NUS in Singapore.
The WHO source said: “If Sars-cov-2 comes from an artificial consensus sequence composed of genomes with 95 per cent similarity to each other ... I would predict that we will never find a really good match in nature and just a bunch of close matches across parts of the sequence, which so far is what we are seeing. The problem is that those opposed to a lab-leak scenario will always just say that we need to sample more ... Scientists overall are afraid of discussing the issue of the origins due to the political situation. This leaves a small and vocal minority of biased scientists free to spread misinformation.”
Daszak, a member of the WHO team investigating the pandemic origins, was also behind a letter published in The Lancet, which dismissed suggestions that COVID did not have a natural origin as a conspiracy theory.