Study Claims Chinese Scientists Created COVID-19, Retro-Engineered By Scientists To Cover Tracks
A new study claims that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a 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.
DailyMail.com exclusively obtained the new 22-page paper authored by British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen set to be published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, which shows there's evidence to suggest Chinese scientists created the virus while working on a Gain of Function project in a Wuhan lab.
Dalgleish, who works at St George’s University, London, and Sørensen, the chair of the pharmaceutical company Immunor, claim Covid-19 has ‘no credible natural ancestor'. The new study claims researchers found 'unique fingerprints' in COVID-19 samples that they say could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory.
Gain of Function research, which was temporarily banned in the U.S., involves altering naturally occurring viruses to make them more infectious in order to study their potential effects on humans.
Dr. Anthony Fauci defended U.S. funding of the Wuhan Institute of Virology earlier this week, saying the $600,000 grant was not approved for Gain of Function research.
Although Fauci said the National Institutes of Health “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Paul says there is evidence to the contrary, The Hill reports.
But the researchers who concluded that COVID-19 'has no credible natural ancestor', also believe scientists reverse-engineered versions of the virus to cover up their tracks.
"We think that there have been retro-engineered viruses created," Dalgleish told DailyMail.com. "They've changed the virus, then tried to make out it was in a sequence years ago."
The two claim to have identified "inserted sections placed on the SARS-CoV-2 spike surface" that explain how the virus interacts with cells in the human body. Virologists, however, note that similar sections appear naturally in other viruses.
The research the two are trying to publish suggests Chinese scientists took a natural coronavirus 'backbone' found in Chinese cave bats and spliced onto it a new 'spike', turning it into the deadly and highly transmissible COVID-19.
Sørensen and Dalgleish said they were studying samples of the virus while working on a COVID vaccine when they discovered evidence that points to human interference. Their study details what they call ‘deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data’ at Chinese labs.
The paper's authors wrote that they have had data based on the first impression evidence of retro-engineering in China' for a year.
Sørensen and Dalgleish’s work contradicts the international scientific consensus that although the coronavirus pandemic originated in Wuhan, there is no evidence that it had been artificially engineered, Forbes reported last year.
Attention has shifted to COVID's origins again this week after the Wall Street Journal published an intelligence report which found that several researchers at the Wuhan institute were hospitalized with illness in November 2019. It’s after WHO and Chinese experts issued a report in March that laid out four hypotheses about how the pandemic emerged.
The World Health Organization said in April 2020 the virus “likely” came from wildlife, not a lab.
The joint team said the most likely scenario was that the coronavirus jumped into people from bats via an intermediary animal, and the prospect that it erupted from a laboratory was deemed ‘extremely unlikely.’
Many experts had staunchly denied the origins of the virus were anything other than a natural infection leaping from animals to humans, DailyMail.com reports.