A new study has claimed that COVID-19 has no credible natural ancestor and was created by Chinese scientists in a Wuhan lab who tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally.

British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen, wrote in their paper that they have prima facie evidence that China retro-engineered the virus. However, their study was ignored by academics and scientific journals.   

The study accuses China of deliberate destruction, concealing data and says that scientists who talked about the unnatural origin of the virus were silenced.

‘Unique fingerprints in COVID-19 virus’

According to a report by Daily Mail, Dalgleish and Sørensen discovered ‘unique fingerprints’ in the virus while analyzing COVID-19 samples last year while they were trying to create a vaccine.

The study claimed that Chinese scientists applied a natural coronavirus backbone found in bats and added a new spike protein which transformed it into a deadly, highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2.

In the 2002 SARS1 epidemic, a bat virus had spread first to civets and from them to people. A similar bat virus also caused a second epidemic of MERS in 2012.

Human H1N1 virus — the same flu that caused the 1918 pandemic — leaked in 1977 in the Soviet Union and China and spread worldwide, reported AFP. 

Anthony Fauci ‘not convinced’ COVID-19 developed naturally

The report was rejected by all the major scientific journals who believed that the virus jumped naturally from bats or other animals to humans.

Earlier this week, top US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said he is “not convinced” COVID-19 developed naturally.

Fauci said he was in favour of an investigation to find the origin of COVID-19.

The WSJ report has claimed that it has credible reports that strongly suggest that a lab leak could have been the likely cause of the outbreak