Feb 19, 2020 11:50:00

Scientists object to conspiracy theory that `` new coronavirus was artificially created ''

Researchers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia have collaborated on a paper saying, 'The new coronavirus has been suggested to have evolved in the natural environment, and may not have been produced by any manipulation in the laboratory.' Announced. Behind this, there is a growing conspiracy theory that the new coronavirus is a weapon artificially created by genetic manipulation.

The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2-Novel 2019 coronavirus / nCoV-2019 Evolutionary History-Virological

http://virological.org/t/the-proximal-origin-of-sars-cov-2/398

Coronavirus: Scientists hit back at rumours humans engineered the deadly contagion | South China Morning Post
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3051167/scientists-hit-back-rumours-engineered-coronavirus

The new coronavirus found in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China in December 2019 is rampant, including a report that the number of infected people increased more than 6 times in a week in February 2020 . It is believed that the origin of such viruses is bats, but the direct cause of infecting humans so far is not only snakes , but also wild animals such as raccoon dogs and civet cats are listed as candidates , There is no unified view at the time of article creation.

Meanwhile, one theory is that the new coronavirus is a weapon produced at a research facility in China. Sen. Tom Cotton from Arkansas, U.S.A., said in a news program Fox News on February 16, 2020, `` only a few kilometers away from the fresh market in Wuhan, China's best

biosafety. level 4 There is a super lab 'of the virus might have come from,' and the remark . He suggested that the virus was produced in the laboratory.

The research facility noted by Sen. Cotton is the Wuhan Virus Research Institute in Wuchang, Wuhan. Certainly, this institute has established the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory (known as Wuhan P4 Lab), the highest-grade safety laboratory with a biosafety level 4 rating.

In the past, Wuhan P4 labs were pointed out to be poorly managed, and there are many ways to link the emergence of a new coronavirus with the Wuhan P4 labs. As a result, not only in the United States but also in China, the view that `` the new coronavirus was made at Wuhan P4 lab '' is spreading, and on the Internet in China, Mr. Masaaki Shishi , a senior researcher at Wuhan P4 lab, Accusations with 'the mother of'. Mr. Stone is in the SNS 'swear toward life, but the new coronavirus has nothing to do with the lab,' a statement of the, was chased in the corresponding .

In response to such a theory, the research team of the Scripps Research Institute immunologist Christian G. Andersen et al. Has directly denied that `` the new coronavirus may not have been generated through operation in the laboratory '' is. The researchers focused on the protein spike, the spike that the new coronavirus uses to enter human cells. The sequence of the gene that produces this spike was found to be different from that of a virus already known to infect humans.

Professor Roy Hall, who studies the protein structure of the virus at the University of Queensland, said, `` If the new coronavirus was made by genetic engineering, it is already known that it will infect humans and cause disease. The genetic structure of the new coronavirus discovered by Andersen et al. Was unknown, so it can be said that the virus evolved in nature. ' States.

And while not involved in the work of Andersen and colleagues, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center vaccine researcher Trevor Bedford said, `` If you look at the mutation status, the genetic variation of the new coronavirus is It appears to be consistent with the mutations that occur in natural evolution, 'he said, saying that the virus evolved in a natural environment, rather than an artificial environment.

Looking at mutation distributions, it appears that the genetic differences in # nCoV2019 are consistent with differences expected to arise during natural evolution, as I would expect engineering to have a distorted AA to nuc ratio and to focus on changing a subset of genes 9/9

— Trevor Bedford (@trvrb) February 3, 2020

According to the research team, the route that the new coronavirus evolved was `` evolved into a virus that can infect humans in non-human animals '' or `` progenitor virus (founder) that has already transmitted humans from non-human animals. Virus) ', and the genome was acquired.'

The research team says, 'To identify the origin of the new coronavirus, it is necessary to identify the direct source of the infection and to examine the gene sequence of the virus obtained therefrom. Hopefully, it will be of great help in virus research, 'he said.