As research into the origin of novel coronavirus continues, a new study has revealed that SARS-CoV-2 has no ‘credible natural ancestor’ and was created by Chinese scientists while working on ‘gain-of-function’ research in a Wuhan lab.
A Daily Mail report, citing the new study, said that scientists took a natural coronavirus ‘backbone’ found in bats and added a ‘spike’ which turned it into the deadly and highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2.
The paper, written by British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr Birger Sorensen, will be published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, claimed the media report.
Daily Mail quoted the authors as saying that there was “prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China” for a year which had been ignored. The duo also accuses Chinese labs of “deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data.”
The US, under President Donald Trump, had repeatedly blamed China for the pandemic and maintained that the virus originated in Wuhan itself.
Now with Joe Biden at the helm, the US Senate recently passed an amendment to permanently ban the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal agencies from funding gain-of-function research projects in China.
The US has renewed its demand to reinvestigate the source of coronavirus, angering China. US health secretary Xavier Becerra demanded that international experts should be allowed to independently assess the source of the deadly virus, which has claimed over 3.5 million lives globally.
President Biden has pushed for it too, ordering intelligence officials to “redouble” efforts to probe the origin of COVID-19 pandemic.
