Top U.S. spy agency: coronavirus not manmade
A statement from U.S. intelligence agencies debunks a conspiracy theory about the origin of the coronavirus, concluding that the virus was "not manmade or genetically modified."
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released the statement Thursday, adding that the U.S. intelligence community will continue efforts to determine if "the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan."
The conclusions were consistent with a worldwide scientific consensus that includes the World Health Organization.
"All available evidence suggests that the virus has a natural animal origin and is not manipulated or constructed virus," said WHO Spokeswoman Fadela Chaib at a briefing on April 21. "The virus most probably has its ecological reservoir in bats," she added.
The announcement comes as the Trump administration continues to push an unproven allegation that virus may have escaped from a Chinese government research lab in Wuhan, the epicenter of the original outbreak.
China's Foreign Ministry dismissed such claims. "Officials of the World Health Organization have repeatedly said there's no evidence the virus was made in a lab, and many experts have also said the claim lacks scientific ground." Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said.
The earliest proponents of the accidental release theory were in fact Chinese. Two Chinese scientists sent a short paper to ResearchGate, suggesting the pathogen could have escape from two Wuhan labs where researchers were studying bat coronaviruses.
The paper was never published. It was a pre-print that had not undergone peer-review. The authors shared it with ResearchGate, a social networking site based in Berlin, Germany for scientists around the world. The Chinese researchers withdrew their paper before its formal publication. One of the authors, Botao Xiao of South China University of Technology, told The Wall Street Journal it was "speculation," which "was not supported by direct proofs."
That did not stop Fox News Channel - one of U.S. President Donald Trump's favorite news outlets - from reporting the theory.
President Trump and members of his cabinet considered it plausible. "More and more, we're hearing the story, and we'll see," Trump said.
The director of one of the Chinese labs in question rejected the idea in an interview with CGTN. Yuan Zhiming of the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, told CGTN that: "There is absolutely no way that the virus original from our institute."
In correspondence sent to one of world's leading science journals, Nature Medicine, leading virologists from the U.S., UK and Australia expressed skepticism of the genetic manipulation theory. Having analyzed the pathogen's genome, they said: "We do not believe that any type of laboratory based-scenario is plausible."
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. expert on infectious disease, and a member of Trump's Coronavirus Task Force, cited this article at a White House briefing. "A group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve," Fauci said, referring to the genome mapping included in the Nature Medicine article. Having looked at the mutations, Fauci dismissed the manmade virus theory, saying the genome: "...is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human."
https://newsus.cgtn.com/news/2020-0...coronavirus-not-manmade-Q7SCeC9Ds4/index.html
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/wor...ies-debunk-conspiracy-theory-covid-19-manmade
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/spy-agencies-evidence-coronavirus-man-200430142921360.html
Trump has
No backing this time.
