The head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, did not rule out the possibility of an artificial origin of the coronavirus, the Associated Press reports.
“I was a laboratory assistant myself; I am an immunologist who worked in the laboratory. There are incidents in them,” he said.
As the director general of the organization noted, it is premature to abandon this theory of the occurrence of SARS-CoV-2.
Ghebreyesus also called on the Chinese authorities for “transparency, openness and cooperation” in the investigation.
The version of the artificial origin of the coronavirus has been actively discussed in the West in recent months. British professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian virologist Birger Sorensen are convinced that Chinese scientists created SARS-CoV-2, and then tried to “cover their tracks.” According to them, the Wuhan researchers wanted to make the virus of natural origin more contagious, so that it could multiply quickly in human cells. To do this, a new “spike” was attached to it. This manipulation is evidenced by a number of four amino acids that Dalgleish and Sorensen found in the “spike” of SARS-CoV-2. This sequence could hardly have occurred naturally in the virus.
Dr. Steven Quay and Richard Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, said that they found a genetic trace in the coronavirus that the natural virus does not possess. Experts have identified a sequence of genomes in the combination of DSP-DSP in SARS-CoV-2. Scientists often use it to increase the contagiousness and lethality of viruses: this is a kind of signal that the insert was made in the laboratory. At the same time, under normal conditions, the order of gnomes SP-SP is extremely rare, experts noted.
China has repeatedly stressed that it adheres to an open position on information on the topic of COVID-19. From the very beginning of the pandemic, Beijing launched an investigation, identified the pathogen and published all the key data. The official representative of the country’s Foreign Ministry, Zhao Lijun, commenting on the intention of the United States to investigate the origin of the coronavirus, called it a political game and an attempt to shift the blame on others.
