Made in China: the coronavirus that killed millions of people

"It has been widely suspected that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic, escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology because of sloppy safety procedures and that it was man-made as part of the so-called gain-of-function research at the institute. If this is the case, it makes China responsible for over 5 million deaths so far and the United States complicit, as it funded the highly dangerous research. The public has been misled about the likely origins of the pandemic right from the start.

The best article I have found on this issue was published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a journal doctors do not read, and I therefore wish to draw attention to its key arguments below.

SARS-CoV-2 has a pair of arginine codons that are routinely used in labs. If the emergence were natural, it would require a recombination event at a site on the virus’s genome where recombinations are rare, and the insertion of a 12-nucleotide sequence with a double arginine codon unknown in the beta-coronavirus repertoire, at the only site in the genome that would significantly expand the virus’s infectivity. This sequence of events is extremely unlikely, and adding a furin cleavage site is known to make a virus more deadly...

It is clear that if the Wuhan Institute had not conducted gain-of-function experiments, and therefore had not collected over 1000 samples of coronaviruses from bat caves in Yunnan 1500 km away from the outbreak in Wuhan, there would have been no pandemic.

This type of research should never have been funded and should never have been performed."