British and Norwegian scientists blame China for creating coronavirus
Chinese scientists created SARS-Cov-2 in a laboratory in Wuhan and then tried to cover up traces with reverse versions of the virus to make it look like it happened naturally, Professor Angus Dalgleish of London's University of St. George and Norwegian scientist Birger said in their study. Sorensen.
The full version of the study, including accusations against the PRC of “deliberate destruction and concealment of data” about a new type of coronavirus in Chinese laboratories, as well as the silence by the authorities of what is happening and the disappearance of a number of scientists in the country, will be published in the coming days, writes the Daily Mail.
Analyzing SARS-Cov-2 samples last year in an attempt to create a vaccine, Dalglish and Sorensen found “unique fingerprints” in the virus, which they say could only have remained after manipulation in the laboratory.
They indicated that they had tried to publish their findings earlier, but their work was rejected by major scientific journals, which at the time were convinced that the virus naturally passed from bats or other animals to humans.
Even when the former head of the UK Foreign Office's Secret Intelligence Service MI6, Richard Dearlove, publicly stated that the scientists' theory should be investigated, the idea was dismissed by the scientific community as “fake news.”
More than a year later, leading scientists, politicians and the media in the West changed their minds and began to consider the possibility of a SARS-Cov-2 leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
Already this week, US President Joe Biden ordered the American intelligence community to reconsider its position on the emergence of the virus, taking into account the version of the laboratory origin of the infection.
The announcement follows the Wall Street Journal's publication of information that the White House was aware of the hospitalization of several researchers from the Wuhan Institute with COVID-19 back in November 2019 – a month before the start of the pandemic.
U.S. health officials have also been criticized for funding controversial and risky experiments by researchers in a Wuhan lab.
Now Dalglish and Sorensen have prepared a new study that concludes that “SARS-Coronavirus-2 does not have a reliable natural ancestor” and that “beyond any doubt” the virus was created as a result of “laboratory manipulation.”
In a 22-page article to be published in the scientific journal Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, the scientists describe their months of “forensic analysis” based on experiments conducted in a Wuhan lab between 2002 and 2019.
Digging through magazine archives and databases, Dalglish and Sorensen said they had figured out how Chinese scientists, some of whom worked with American universities, found the tools to create the coronavirus.
The work, collectively titled Gain of Function, involved modifying natural viruses to make them more infectious so that they could replicate in human cells in the laboratory.
Dalglish and Sorensen argue that scientists working on the Gain of Function projects took the natural coronavirus found in Chinese cave bats as a “basis” and put a new “spike” on it, turning it into a deadly and highly contagious SARS-Cov- 2.
One of the characteristic signs of human interference with the virus, scientists called the presence of a row of four amino acids in the spike of SARS-Cov-2, which, they say, is almost impossible, since the positively charged amino acids repel each other.
“The laws of physics dictate that you cannot have a row of four positively charged amino acids in a row. The only way to get it is to artificially fabricate it. The likelihood that this is the result of natural processes is very small, ”says Dalglish.
He also pointed out that everyone expected the SARS-Cov-2 virus to gradually mutate and become more infectious, but less pathogenic, but this did not happen.
During a Senate hearing last week, White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci said he could not rule out that US funding for researchers in the Wuhan lab has not been spent on risky experiments to tamper with the virus.
“How do you know they didn't lie to you and actually used the money to improve functional research?” Louisiana Senator John F. Kennedy asked Fauci.
“It can never be known [for certain],” he replied, but added that the scientists in the Wuhan lab were “trustworthy.”
Director of the US National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, in turn, said that US-funded “research work to increase the functionality [of viruses] has not been approved by his institution.”
It's worth noting that, according to the Washington Post, US State Department officials visited a research institute in Wuhan back in 2018 and sent two official warnings to Washington about an unacceptably low level of safety in the laboratory.
In February last year, a molecular biomechanics researcher at South China University of Technology Botao Xiao published an article claiming that “the killer coronavirus probably came from a laboratory in Wuhan.”
However, Professor Christian Andersen of the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at the Scripps Research Center in California described such assumptions as “complete nonsense, not even remotely scientific.”
Last February, a group of 27 scientists published the following statement in the Lancet: “Together we strongly condemn conspiracy theories that suggest that COVID-19 is not of natural origin.”
“Scientists have come to the conclusion that this coronavirus originated in the wild,” the document also said.
However, later, three of the signatories retracted their words, stating that, in their opinion, an emergency in the laboratory is the likely cause of the spread of the virus outside.
Also last year, US President Donald Trump indicated that he allegedly saw intelligence that gave him “a high degree of confidence” that the global pandemic originates in a Chinese institution.
According to The Mail on Sunday, the British cabinet also considers a virus leak from the institute likely.
There was also no consensus in China about the origin of the infection.
“At first, we assumed the virus might have originated in the seafood market, but now the market is more like a victim,” said Gao Fu, director of China's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Matthew Pottinger, Trump's deputy national security adviser, argued that the latest US intelligence points to a virus leak from the top-secret Wuhan Institute of Virology, located 17 kilometers from the wet market.
In November last year, an article by bioengineer Rossana Segreto and geneticist Yuri Deigin stated that “the genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 does not exclude laboratory origin.” The material noted the features of the virus, which “may be the result of laboratory manipulations”, for example – “directed mutagenesis”.
In the same month, David Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist who worked on biosafety initiatives for the US government, published an article in the National Academy of Scientists journal that the COVID-19 “origin story” was “missing many key details,” including – a plausible story of the virus and an explanation of how the first person got infected.
