Amid growing speculation that the coronavirus leaked from China’s infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology, two US experts have now claimed that COVID-19’s rare genome shows that the virus was developed in a Chinese laboratory.
According to the American experts, Dr Stephen Quay, and Richard Muller, the Covid-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus.
Quay is the founder of US-based biopharmaceutical company Atossa Therapeutics, while Muller is a Physics professor at the University of California Berkeley. “The most compelling reason to favour the lab leak hypothesis is firmly based in science,” the experts wrote.
Quay and Muller stated that Covid-19 has the genome sequencing ‘CGG-CGG’ (also known as “double CGG”), which is one of the 36 sequencing patterns. CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.
“In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus,” the experts noted.
‘COVID seems man-made’
The experts further claimed that both SARS and MERS were confirmed to have a natural origin and when a virus spreads through the human population, it is known to evolve rapidly till the most contagious forms dominate.
However, Covid-19 did not work that way, they added.
“It appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version. No serious viral “improvement” took place until a minor variation occurred many months later in England. It is unprecedented, and suggests a long period of adaptation that predated its public spread,” they stated.
