Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a lab and then tried to cover their tracks, new study claims

An explosive new study claims that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab, then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats. An explosive new study on the origins of COVID-19 pandemic claims researchers found 'unique fingerprints' in samples of the virus that they say could only have arisen from manipulation in a lab - supporting theories that it escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China The paper's authors, Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen and British Professor Angus Dalgleish said initial attempts to publish their findings had been rejected by major scientific journals While China has tried to insist the virus originated elsewhere, academics, politicians and the media have begun to contemplate the possibility it escaped from the WIV - raising suspicions that Chinese officials simply hid evidence of the early spread While analyzing COVID-19 samples last year in an attempt to create a vaccine, Dalgleish and Sørensen discovered 'unique fingerprints' in the virus that they say could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory. In it, researchers describe their months-long 'forensic analysis' into experiments done at the Wuhan lab between 2002 and 2019 A 'GenBank' table included in the paper lists various coronavirus strains, with the dates they were collected and then when they were submitted to the gene bank, showing a delay of several years for some One diagram of the coronavirus shows six 'fingerprints' identified by the two scientists, which they say show the virus must have been made in a lab A second diagram showed how a row of four amino acids found on the SARS-Cov-2 spike have a positive charge that clings to human cells like a magnet, making the virus extremely infectious What is Gain of Function research? The study concluded 'SARS-Coronavirus-2 has no credible natural ancestor' and that it is 'beyond reasonable doubt' that the virus was created through 'laboratory manipulation' The study claims that scientists at the Wuhan lab working on Gain of Function projects took a natural coronavirus 'backbone' found in Chinese cave bats and spliced onto it a new 'spike', turning it into the deadly and highly transmissible COVID-19 During a Senate hearing on Wednesday, White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted he was not certain US funding for researchers at the Wuhan lab was not spent on controversial and risky Gain of Function experiments. 27 scientists published a statement in The Lancet on February 19 last year saying they 'strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that covid-19 does not have a natural origin' and asserted that experts 'overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife' – though three authors later backtracked A group of prominent scientists wrote in leading journal Nature on March 17, 2020 that 'the evidence shows that SARSCoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus,' and that 'we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible' In an unorthodox move, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a public statement on April 30 last year that 'The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified' But dissenting voices have started to appear, pointing to evidence that COVID-19 in fact originated from a Wuhan lab: In November last year, a paper by bioengineer Rossana Segreto and geneticist Yuri Deigin conceded that 'the genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 does not rule out a laboratory origin' and noted features of the virus that 'might be the result of lab manipulation techniques such as site-directed mutagenesis' The same month, David Relman, a Stanford University microbiologist who has worked on biosecurity initiatives for the government, wrote a journal article for the National Academy of Scientists that the 'origin story' for covid-19 is 'missing many key details', including a plausible history of the virus and explanation of how the first human got infected Earlier this month, 18 prominent scientists published a letter in the top journal Science, calling for a new investigation into the origins of the virus, adding that 'theories of accidental release from a lab and zoonotic spillover both remain viable' 'How do you know they didn't lie to you and use the money for gain of function research anyway?'