The recent talk of the town, since the beginning of this pandemic, was the question, “Is COVID-19 manmade?
With the most controversial origin, the SARS-CoV-2 causes the disease COVID-19. There are two theories for its origin, one being the zoonotic spillover and the other is a lab accident. Those who refer to it as being made in the lab believe that it is caused by a laboratory leak or a mistake of epic proportion because there aren’t enough shreds of evidence to refute this theory. Though there is not any evidence for its being a lab accident either, there are certain political reasons like lack of trust in the Chinese government that could be the slim basis of this theory. But this theory doesn’t make much sense.
There are however many pieces of evidence from the past where the disease of animals, jumped into humans to cause illness. Those infectious agents were previously dependent on non-human hosts, but the genetic evolution caused them to host humans as well. The scientists are of the view that the virus has a natural origin as it is quite common, still, the news headlines are flashing that “the scientist has proved that COVID-19 is bioengineered in the lab”. Let’s dig into the truth and find out what’s going on?
All these rumors started from a report published in the journal Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery by three authors. They are found quoting that they have identified ‘unique fingerprints’ in the coronavirus that could have been created in the lab. This peer-reviewed academic piece also claims that Chinese authorities have intentionally demolished the data, that could prove this hypothesis. It sounds like a very absurd claim.
The daily mail has first shed light on this story. The original paper could be seen on their website. The authors who worked on this project were initially refused to get published. This paper isn’t present on the preprint servers or academic publications, rather it was hosted on the right-wing Norwegian newsletter Minerva, as a long article, where the authors blamed “foul play and political consider” for their paper being rejected from both Science and Nature.
The question that comes to mind is, what does the initial paper say?
Instead of providing evidence for the lab synthesis of SARS-CoV-2, the authors claimed in their paper that others should disprove this theory because it is so ‘parsimonious’, meaning not very scientific. Furthermore, their many arguments have been picked apart by the scientists online. The evidence provided by them isn’t convincing, those are mere speculations of three people.
On the contrary, there are numerous explanations and indications from the scientific community, disproving the lab leak hypothesis and considering it, extremely unlikely by World Health Organization. They carried out an investigation and found that there was no evidence of people from the Wuhan Institute of Virology having antibodies against coronavirus before the outbreak. Though they also didn’t find enough evidence to dismiss the idea of the coronavirus being a synthesized virus, that has given us an interesting position.
Keywords:
SARS-CoV-2, Pandemic, coronavirus, Wuhan Institute of Virology, china, coronavirus spillover events, controversial article, zoonotic transfer, bioengineered, Minerva.
virologia
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