Two notable virologists claim to have found "unique fingerprints" on COVID-19 samples that only could have arisen from laboratory manipulation, according to an explosive 22-page paper obtained by the Daily Mail.
British professor Angus Dalgleish - best known for creating the world's first 'HIV vaccine', and Norwegian virologist Dr. Birger Sørensen - chair of pharmaceutical company, Immunor, who has published 31 peer-reviewed papers and holds several patents, wrote that while analyzing virus samples last year, the pair discovered "unique fingerprints" in the form of "six inserts" created through gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.
They also conclude that "SARS-Coronavirus-2 has "no credible natural ancestor" and that it is "beyond reasonable doubt" that the virus was created via "laboratory manipulation."
Last year, Sørensen told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that COVID-19 has properties which have 'never been detected in nature,' and that the United States has 'collaborated for many years on coronavirus research through "gain of function" studies with China.
The paper detailing their months-long "forensic analysis," which looked back at experiments done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology between 2002 and 2019, is set to be published in the scientific journal Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery.
More via the Mail:
Digging through archives of journals and databases, Dalgleish and Sørensen pieced together how Chinese scientists, some working in concert with American universities, allegedly built the tools to create the coronavirus.
Much of the work was centered around controversial 'Gain of Function' research – temporarily outlawed in the US under the Obama administration.
Gain of Function involves tweaking naturally occurring viruses to make them more infectious, so that they can replicate in human cells in a lab, allowing the virus's potential effect on humans to be studied and better understood.
Dalgleish and Sørensen claim that scientists 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 SARS-Cov-2.
One tell-tale sign of alleged manipulation the two men highlighted was a row of four amino acids they found on the SARS-Cov-2 spike.
In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Sørensen said the amino acids all have a positive charge, which cause the virus to tightly cling to the negatively charged parts of human cells like a magnet, and so become more infectious.
But because, like magnets, the positively charged amino acids repel each other, it is rare to find even three in a row in naturally occurring organisms, while four in a row is 'extremely unlikely,' the scientist said.
'The laws of physics mean that you cannot have four positively charged amino acids in a row. The only way you can get this is if you artificially manufacture it,' Dalgleish told DailyMail.com.
Their new paper says these features of SARS-Cov-2 are 'unique fingerprints' which are 'indicative of purposive manipulation', and that 'the likelihood of it being the result of natural processes is very small.'
'A natural virus pandemic would be expected to mutate gradually and become more infectious but less pathogenic which is what many expected with the COVID-19 pandemic but which does not appear to have happened,' the scientists wrote.
'The implication of our historical reconstruction, we posit now beyond reasonable doubt, of the purposively manipulated chimeric virus SARS-CoV-2 makes it imperative to reconsider what types of Gain of Function experiments it is morally acceptable to undertake.
When Sørensen and Dalgleish floated their findings last year, it was 'debunked' with the thinnest of logic - however former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove pointed to the pair's findings as an "important" development which could prove that the pandemic may have originated at the WIV.
Sørensen and Dalgleish aren't the first scientists to find unusual features within COVID-19. Last June, the Daily Telegraph reported that there are two unique features to COVID-19:
First, the virus binds more strongly to human ACE2 enzymes than any other species, including bats.
Second, SARS-CoV-2 has a "furin cleavage site" missing in its closes bat-coronavirus relative, RaTG-13, which makes it significantly more infectious - a finding we reported in late February.
According to Israeli geneticist, Dr. Ronen Shemesh, the Furin site is the most unusual finding.
"I believe that the most important issue about the differences between ALL coronavirus types is the insertion of a Furin protease cleavage site at the Spike protein of SARS-CoV-2," he said. "Such an insertion is very rare in evolution, the addition of such 4 Amino acids alone in the course of only 20 years is very unlikely."
"There are many reasons to believe that the COVID-19 generating SARS-CoV-2 was generated in a lab. Most probably by methods of genetic engineering," he said, adding "I believe that this is the only way an insertion like the FURIN protease cleavage site could have been introduced directly at the right place and become effective."
Dr Shemesh, who has a PhD in Genetics and Molecular Biology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and over 21 years of experience in the field of drug discovery and development, said it is even “more unlikely” that this insertion happened in exactly the right place of the cleavage site of the spike protein - which is where it would need to occur to make the virus more infectious. -Daily Telegraph
"What makes it even more suspicious is that fact that this insertion not only occurred on the right place and in the right time, but also turned the cleavage site from an Serine protease cleavage site to a FURIN cleavage site," he added.
In January 2020, a team of Indian scientists wrote in a now-retracted paper that the coronavirus may have been genetically engineered to incorporate parts of the HIV genome, writing "This uncanny similarity of novel inserts in the 2019- nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature," meaning - it was unlikely to have occurred naturally.
The next month, a team of researchers in Nankai University noted that COVID-19 has an 'HIV-like mutation' that allows it to quickly enter the human body by binding with a receptor called ACE2 on a cell membrane.
Other highly contagious viruses, including HIV and Ebola, target an enzyme called furin, which works as a protein activator in the human body. Many proteins are inactive or dormant when they are produced and have to be “cut” at specific points to activate their various functions.
When looking at the genome sequence of the new coronavirus, Professor Ruan Jishou and his team at Nankai University in Tianjin found a section of mutated genes that did not exist in Sars, but were similar to those found in HIV and Ebola. -SCMP
According to the Nankai University study, the furin binding method is "100 to 1,000 times as efficient' as SARS at entering cells.
"This protein cleaving protein is highly promiscuous, it’s found in many human tissues and cell types and is involved in many OTHER virus types activation and infection mechanisms (it is involved in HIV, Herpes, Ebola and Dengue virus mechanisms)," said Dr. Shemesh. "If I was trying to engineer a virus strain with a higher affinity and infective potential to humans, I would do exactly that: I would add a Furin Cleavage site directly at the original less effective and more cell specific cleavage site."
Meanwhile, Flinders University Professor Nikolai Petrovsky found last year either "a remarkable coincidence or a sign of human intervention" within COVID-19 telling the Telegraph that COVID-19 is "exquisitely adapted to humans."
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