'No natural ancestors', COVID-19 created at a Wuhan lab: New Study
New Delhi : The novel coronavirus has no credible natural ancestors and it was created at a Wuhan lab by a team of Chinese scientists while working on ‘gain-of-function' research, said a report by Daily Mail citing a new study.
According to the report, the scientists took a natural coronavirus ‘backbone’ found in bats and added a new spike, making it an easily transmissible virus among humans. British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr Birger Sørensen authored the new 22-page paper which is set to be published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, as per Daily Mail.
The study also claims that the Chinese scientists attempted a reverse-engineering to make it look like a naturally evolved virus from the bats.
Quoting the authors, Daily Mail said that the duo had “prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China” for a year but was ignored by academics and major journals. The study also accuses Chinese labs of “deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data.”
It has been learned that the US Senate has passed a resolution to ban the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal agencies from funding gain-of-function research projects in China.
“We don’t know whether the pandemic started in a lab in Wuhan or evolved naturally,” Republican senator Rand Paul, who sponsored the amendment, said in a statement.
Many scientists are still trying to figure out the source of coronavirus that has claimed more than 3.5 lakh lives so far.
US President Joe Biden on Wednesday ordered intelligence officials to “redouble” efforts to probe the origins of the pandemic, including the possibility of a Chinese laboratory link. Biden said in a statement that the majority of the intelligence community had “coalesced” around two scenarios but “do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other.”
