Story at-a-glance
- According to Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, SARS-CoV-2 did not evolve in a manner you’d expect, had it jumped from an animal to a human. It sprang into action fully evolved for human transmission
- It appears Nature, a top medical journal, has allowed authors to secretly alter data sets in their papers without publishing notices of correction
- Chan’s investigation reveals authors have renamed samples, failed to attribute them properly, and produced a genomic profile that doesn’t match the samples in their paper. Others are missing data
- RaTG13 — the coronavirus that most resembles SARS-CoV-2, being 96% identical — is actually btCoV-4991, a virus found in samples collected in 2013 and published in 2016
- If SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19 and the subsequent response to it, came from a lab, then we need to reassess the future of gain-of-function research that allows for the weaponization of viruses
Does the origin of SARS-CoV-2 matter? Yes, it does. The reason it matters is because if the virus responsible for COVID-19 and the subsequent response to it came from a lab, then we need to reassess the future of so-called gain-of-function research that allows for the weaponization of viruses.
As you might expect, there’s big money involved in this kind of research, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that vested interests would try to cover up its origin, were it indeed a lab creation, simply to protect their funding and future careers.1 What’s surprising, however, is the finding that a top medical journal appears to have aided and abetted efforts to hide SARS-CoV-2’s origin.
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Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
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