Study claims coronavirus originated in Chinese lab – but experts don’t wave Trump survey live on TV – commission of inquiry doesn’t want ‘circus’

The result of the research of the three scientists from the US and Würzburg is explosive. They report that Sars-CoV-2 is an infectious clone and was most likely made in a Chinese lab. The study, which was published on the bioRxiv preprint server platform, also contains a caveat. It was not independently verified by experts and the research results in the press were not described as convincing.

The origin of Sars-CoV-2 has sparked speculation since the start of the pandemic. In May 2021, a World Health Organization (WHO) study found the absolute most likely variant to be zoonotic. One speaks of zoonosis when a virus jumps from animal to human and spreads there. Scientists believe the pathogens came from bats living in caves in southern China, and the pathogen eventually jumped to the animal market in Wuhan. The Australian evolutionary biologist Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney found many traces there that support this thesis of zoonosis.

Accidents in laboratories are possible

But since December 30, 2019 informed the “Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases” about pneumonia in Wuhan, there have been rumors that the coronavirus may have escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) specializes in researching coronaviruses, collecting samples from wild bats in search of new viruses and conducting experiments. Because the WIV investigated precisely these viruses at the time, a connection is in any case conceivable. Accidents can happen in laboratories. These are usually a series of unfortunate events and circumstances and not bad intentions like in a Hollywood movie.

Since such rumors quickly lead to conspiracy theories, in May 2021 18 scientists from around the world asked the journal “Science” to explain the laboratory thesis in detail. Richard Neher, virus specialist at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, was also a co-signer. In May 2021, US President Joe Biden also ordered his secret services to investigate the origin of Sars-CoV-2. A request to which the Chinese government responded sharply at the time. She vigorously defended herself against the suspicion that the virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory. The Chinese referred to the WHO investigation, according to which a leak in a laboratory was “extremely unlikely”.

According to Washburne, Corona is a contagious clone

In their untested study, Alex Washburne and Antonius VanDongen from the US and Valentin Bruttel from Würzburg now write that Sars-CoV-2 is an anomaly characteristic of a synthetic virus. Therefore, the virus is more a product of a laboratory than of natural evolution. “Sars-CoV-2 was most likely created as an infectious clone assembled in vitro,” the study authors write. So the virus would have been put together by some form of genetic engineering.

To do this, they used a new method that could detect viruses produced in the lab. The researchers assume that for artificially produced viruses, shorter fragments of the genome would be produced. A DNA with less than 8,000 letters. Such fragments are generated using restriction enzymes. These are molecular scissors that cut the genome at specific parts of the genetic letters.

If a genome does not have such restriction sites at suitable sites, the researchers usually create new sites themselves. And these restrictions on the coronavirus are similar to those in genetically engineered viruses, the authors write, whose Alex Washburne of Selva, a small microbiome science start-up in New York, has a rather dubious reputation.

Neher sees no evidence of a laboratory virus in this

“I would be careful with this preprint,” says Richard Neher. “The authors describe a somewhat unusual pattern of restriction enzyme recognition sequences. However, all these positions occur in related coronavirus sequences from the animal world, even if it is not exactly in this combination,” says the virus analyst from Basel. This combination is not that special and can arise by chance in the course of evolution. Neher says:

Immunologist Kristian G. Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, is tough on the study’s authors. The research was so flawed it wouldn’t even make it through molecular biology preschool, he writes on Twitter. Other scientists question the value of the research. Evolutionary biologist Holmes says in The Economist that each of the traits identified in the study is natural and already found in other bat viruses. Researchers who would develop a new virus undoubtedly introduced some new features into the virus. There are a number of technical reasons why this is complete nonsense.

Sylvestre Marillonnet of the Leibniz Institute for Plant Biochemistry in Germany also cites arguments against the study, but agrees that the number and distribution of these restriction sites did not seem entirely random. However, there are arguments against this hypothesis. For example, the short length of one of the six DNA fragments does not seem logical. As science always demands, the researchers agree that Washburne’s study needs further investigation.