Can Coronavirus Be Artificially Created In The Lab ?

Senator Tom Cotton has reignited a debate on suspicions that coronavirus is an artificial creation in a lab.

Sen. Cotton claims that Wuhan based Cellular Level Biosafety Level 4 lab is the starting point of Coronavirus spread. This labor is a high-level operational security facility for research on dangerous pathogens. The lab is near the food market, where the first infections are said to originate.

Cotton wants a further investigation on the possible connection of the virus spread and Chinas sole biosafety level 4 super laboratory. He told Fox News that he does not have evidence to support his claim but relates it to chase the government’s dishonesty and duplicity from the start of the outbreak. There have been claims that the communist party had silenced doctors from revealing the existence of coronavirus.

HIV in coronavirus theory

Lab creation theory has also been the talk by other people after a scientific paper ob bioRxiv on January 31, 2020, claimed there was evidence that protein sequence in coronavirus had many similarities to HIV.

Many scientists pointed out that the analysis had flaws noting that the sequence on COVID-19(a type of coronavirus that is spreading now) has extremely short sequences. They match other organisms, so there is no reason to conclude they are from HIV. Authors withdrew it after two days explaining that they do not want to feed conspiracy theories. Many websites and publications continue publishing the theory even after bioRxiv pulled down the scientific paper.

Kristian Anderson, a director of infectious disease genomics (Scripps Research Translation Institute), is among the viral genomics experts who dispute artificial creation of coronavirus. He says HIV study is a misunderstanding on the performance of the analysis. Andersen explains that the short proteins Indian scientists found similar to HIV are a result of Coronaviruses' natural evolution. He suggests that authors of scientific paper linking Coronaviruses to HIV missed the point.

Anderson says that had they taken made a step to compare new coronavirus to related bat viruses instead of SARS alone, they would have found the presence of peptides in bat viruses. The peptides do not develop from HIV.

Some Facebook claim that HIV medication can treat coronavirus, so there is a connection. A University of North Carolina virologist explains that there are few anti-viral approved drugs, and doctors can try them on patients at the emergence of a new virus to see if it will help. He adds that many antiviral are HIV medications, and doctors will naturally prescribe them. However, there is no evidence that coronavirus is responding to HIV drugs than others.

Lack of bioengineering signs

A general notion even in a surprise paper by the South China University of Technology is that Wuhan Center for Disease Control could be the origin of contagion in Wuhan city and Hubei Province. The report claims that Genome sequences from coronavirus patients were 89 or 90 % identical to the Bat Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus. It is a type in native bats found 600 miles away from Wuhan, and they are unlikely to have flown there.

There is consistency with evidence relating to the origin of the virus to animals. Virologist Timothy Sheahan said it related to lessons for scientists in the last two decades that all viruses, including SARS, share 96% of the genome with bat virus. The genetic data confirms the scientific claim that viruses, including coronavirus, comes from a bat reservoir and not a lab.The genetic differences of COVID-19 to its recent ancestors are consistent with expected changes during natural evolution, according to Fred Hutchinson, a computation biologist. He explained in a Twitter post that an engineered virus would most likely have a distortion in amino acid, nucleotide ration, and changes focusing on a genetic subset. Bioengineering would have caused meaningful engineering to a virus, but no evidence points to such happening in 2019-to genome.

The nucleotide changes in the latest Coronaviruses are few at around 14 % and consistent with expectations in a virus that is evolving naturally. The ration matches that of the bat virus with the most similarity to 2019-now. Despite claims about lab creation of coronavirus, arguments by scientists are not accepting the idea because they have not noted significant changes in 2019-nCoV genes.