BEIJING (China Daily/ANN): A scientist from the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has debunked a recent conspiracy theory that claimed the novel coronavirus was manufactured and escaped from the institute's most advanced biocontainment facility.
Shi Zhengli, a researcher from the institute, said on social media on Sunday that the virus was the result of"nature punishing the uncivilised habits and customs of humans", and she is willing to"bet my life that it has nothing to do with the lab".
Her comments came after Indian scientists recently published a non-peer-reviewed paper suggesting that scientists had artificially inserted genes from the HIV virus into the coronavirus, thus making it susceptible to anti-HIV treatments. In a twitter post commenting on the paper, David Liu, a chemistry professor at Harvard University, said:"The mere claim that such short inserts support nCoV origins 'unlikely to be fortuitous in nature' is already highly suspect.""This is a classic case of searching for lost keys only under a lamppost," Liu said.
Though the articles provided no evidence, the fringe theory quickly went viral on social media, prompting media outlets from the BBC to Foreign Policy to speak up against it.
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