No, Coronavirus is not a bioengineered weapon

Bruce Y. Lee, Senior Contributor, Forbes magazine, cites the research that debunks the conspiracy theory

Love conspiracy theories? Especially when two groups of people have pretty much the same conspiracy theory about each other?

Some folks including politicians in both the U.S. and China have suggested that the COVID-19 coronavirus (SARS-CoV2) that’s causing the pandemic may actually be a bioweapon that was manufactured in a lab.

Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) tweeted out back on January 30: We still don’t know where coronavirus originated. Could have been a market, a farm, a food processing company. I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”

Then, New York Post published on February 22 an opinion piece titled, “Don’t buy China’s story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab.”

So do they have any kind of scientific evidence? None to show.

Not to be outdone, some in China have made similar suggestions, except that it’s the U.S. that built the virus and released it in China. Which is pooh-poohed by  Zhao Lijian, a high official of China: “Yes, the claim is that the U.S. released a virus in China so that the U.S. can then eventually suffer the consequences of the spreading virus just a couple months later. Makes a whole lotta sense, except that it doesn’t. Where exactly is the real evidence that the U.S. military created SARS-CoV2?”

In fact, there is not only a lack of evidence supporting these conspiracy theories, there has been growing strong scientific evidence against both of them. Scientists have been conducting genetic analyses to determine where the virus came from and how it ended up infecting humans.

On February 26, 2020, the New England Journal of Medicine published a Perspective piece by avid M. Morens, M.D. and Peter Daszak, Ph.D. from the National Institute of Health (NIH) and Jeffery K. Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D. claiming: “Of course, scientists tell us that SARS-CoV-2 did not escape from a jar: RNA sequences closely resemble those of viruses that silently circulate in bats, and epidemiologic information implicates a bat-origin virus infecting unidentified animal species sold in China’s live-animal markets.”

Even more evidence of a natural rather than human-made origin for SARS-CoV2 has emerged from a study described in a research letter recently published in Nature Medicine. In the letter, a multinational research team described how they had analyzed the genetic sequences that code for the protein spikes on the surface of SARS-CoV2. The virus looks sort of like a medieval mace with multiple spikes sticking out from its spherical shape. These spikes aren’t just for show as the virus uses them to latch on to a cell that it wants to invade and then push its way into the cell.

Apparently, portions of these spike proteins are so effective in targeting specific receptors on human cells that it is hard to imagine humans manufacturing them, not with known existing technology. The researchers then concluded that this feature and thus the new coronavirus could have in all likelihood only evolved over time naturally. You see humans can make useful stuff like ride-sharing apps but are still quite puny compared to nature when it comes to making stuff like viruses.

In fact, the research team found that the SARS-CoV-2 structure in general is quite different from what humans would have likely concocted. If a human had wanted to create a viral weapon, he or she would have started with the structure of a virus that’s already known to cause illness in people. Naturally, if you want to make a weapon, you may want to start with something like a grenade launcher rather than a smoothie maker.

The findings from the genetic analyses are consistent with how SARS-CoV2 is currently behaving. The virus is not acting like a bio-weapon right now. The best bio-weapons kill at a much higher rate and can be readily transported and released. Imagine being told that a bio-weapon might take the lives of 1% to 3.4% of the people that it infects but you don’t quite know specifically which ones. The difference between SARS-CoV2 and pathogens like the Ebola Virus or anthrax is like the difference between a bunch of sofas and a collection of missiles.

Image courtesy of thesatimes |

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