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Dr. Fauci, Nature Medicine Refute Lie That Wuhan Virology Lab Developed SARS-CoV-2
April 19, 2020 (EIRNS)— At the daily White House press briefing, on April 17, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, presented the proof that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was not manmade and did not originate in a laboratory—in China, or elsewhere.
At the press conference, a reporter asked Fauci: “Could you address these suggestions or concerns that this virus was somehow manmade, possibly came out of a laboratory in China?” Dr. Fauci replied,
“There was a study recently, that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.”
“We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible,” is the conclusion of the analysis-study published in Nature Medicine on March 17. “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors say at the outset in their message to the editor. The study, led by computational biologist Kristian Andersen, Department of Immunology and Microbiology of the Scripps Research Institute in California, compared COVID-19 to the six other coronaviruses known to infect humans.
The study, entitled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” discusses scenarios by which SARS-CoV-2 could, or could not, have arisen.
Under the sub-heading, “Theories of SARS-CoV-2 Origins,” the study states, “Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used. However, the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone.” The authors continue: “Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer. We also discuss whether selection during passage could have given rise to SARS-CoV-2.”
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