OCTOBER 21, 2022
On Thursday, a scientific article released on BioRxiv detailed peculiarities in the SARS-CoV-2 virus, allegedly suggestive of human meddling. The scientists concluded there is a "high likelihood" that the virus, which has reportedly claimed the lives of over 6.5 million people worldwide, "may have originated as an infectious clone assembled in vitro."
Confirmation of the scientists' findings might prove politically and legally consequential, since it would mean the pandemic was the result of human error or construction and not caused by seemingly malevolent evolutionary processes.
This damning study, which has already been met with numerous expert critiques, was released amid renewed official interest in the gain-of-function research funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and undertaken at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), whose P4 lab is widely regarded to have been the likely origin point of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Antonius VanDongen of the Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology at Duke University, Valentin Bruttel of the German University Clinics of Würzburg, and Alex Washburne of Selva Analytics together conducted the study. The resulting paper is a preprint, not yet certified by peer review but subjected to basic screening and hosted by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's BioRxiv, which serves as an open-access preprint repository for the biological sciences.
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