A study claiming Covid was made in a lab has ignited a furious row, as the researchers behind it have been accused of “fixing” their results by other scientists.
A pre-print study shared widely online purported to have found evidence that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid, was the result of human intervention.
While the findings were lauded by some scientists as “the strongest piece of evidence to date” that Covid came from a lab, others have condemned the paper as “confected nonsense”.
The authors of the paper claim to have found evidence that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a lab experiment which cloned a coronavirus, moved around chunks of DNA and rearranged them in a specific order, thus producing the Covid virus.
Alex Washburne, one of the authors, said: “We examined whether SARS-CoV-2 was synthesised in a lab. We studied a common method for synthesising [coronaviruses] in the lab.
“This method was thought to not leave a fingerprint. We found the fingerprint. That fingerprint is in the SARS-CoV-2 genome.”
Viscount Matt Ridley, who co-authored a book on the origin of the coronavirus, called the new work a “hugely important study”.
“Evidence that strongly suggests SARS-CoV-2 was engineered may have been hiding in plain sight all along,” he said.
Prof Francois Balloux, the director of the UCL Genetics Institute, said it was “the strongest piece of evidence to date against a simple scenario of strict zoonotic origin for SARS-CoV-2”.
But prominent academics have rubbished the findings, claiming it was a “self-fulfilling prophecy” and the findings are “highly misleading”.
Critics say the signals the authors claim to be evidence of a lab origin are not a smoking gun because these genetic fingerprints are naturally found in many viruses, including the common cold.
Prof Stuart Neil, a professor of virology at King’s College London (KCL), accused the team of “stacking the deck” by cherry-picking their analysis and turning their paper into a “self-fulfilling prophecy”.
“It is confected nonsense put out to create a splash of controversy and become a talking point in the US and UK media,” he told The Telegraph.
Prof David Robertson, head of viral genomics at the Centre for Virus Research at the University of Glasgow, said paper was “nonsense” and “highly misleading”.
Prof Kristian Andersen, evolutionary biologist and professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute, called the work “nothing more than poppycock dressed up as science”.
Read more via The Telegraph
