Two U.S. experts said that science strongly suggests the novel Coronavirus was manufactured inside a Chinese laboratory. The claim was made by Drs Stephen Quay, CEO of biopharmaceutical company Atossa Therapeutics Inc, and Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California Berkeley.
The experts say that proof lies in genome sequencing, or analyzing the DNA, of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. There are 36 DNA segments – made up of three-letter words that viruses use to make an amino acid known as L-arginine.L-arginine helps make proteins but is also often used in so-called ‘gain of function’ research, which alters viruses to make them more transmissible and more deadly. The new Coronavirus contains a segment called CGG-CGG, which is considered rare even in experiments in which researchers are trying to manipulate the virus.
This combination has never been found naturally in any other type of Coronavirus, including in SARS and MERS, both of which are cousins of the new virus. Quay and Muller wrote that a virus cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus. The CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here.
The essay comes after an explosive study last week claimed that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in the Wuhan lab, then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats. Recently revealed emails by Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, showed that he was warned as early as Jan. 2020 that the virus may have been engineered.
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