New evidence indicates COVID-19 is not manufactured

The deadly virus known coronavirus and the disease that it causes, deemed COVID-19 that struck the town of Wuhan, China last year is now wreaking havoc across the globe and we still don’t understand much about it. There is one thing we do know now though, and that is where this strain of coronavirus was birthed and possibly how.

According to findings recently published in Nature Medicine, the pandemic-causing virus most likely the product of natural evolution. Contrary to popular belief that the virus was manufactured in a lab or a product of bio-warfare, scientists have found no evidence of this after analysis of many different genome sequences of similar viruses.

“By comparing the available genome sequence data for known coronavirus strains, we can firmly determine that SARS-CoV-2 originated through natural processes,” said Kristian Andersen, PhD, an associate professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research.

For some background, coronavirus is not new to the world. coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that can cause illnesses ranging widely in severity. The first known severe illness caused by a coronavirus emerged with the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in China. A second outbreak of severe illness began in 2012 in Saudi Arabia with the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).

On December 31 of last year, Chinese authorities alerted the World Health Organization of an outbreak of a novel strain of the coronavirus — what would become the strain that causes COVID-19. This same outbreak spread throughout China, eventually reaching all corners of the world sickening hundreds of thousands and killing thousands.

Scientists have now been examining and analyzing the virus for many different factors. The authors of the paper published in Nature Medicine studied the virus’ spike proteins, which act as arms for the virus allowing it to grab onto and enter the walls of a host cell.

Through this research, scientists have concluded that COVID-19 was the result of natural evolution and natural selection after finding that this strain had evolved to effectively target a molecular feature of the human body responsible for blood pressure regulation.

This evidence for natural evolution was backed by data on the overall molecular structure. If the virus were engineered for bio-warfare, scientists say that the engineers would have created the virus using the backbone of an existing virus known to cause illness. With this data, scientists concluded that COVID-19 resembled viruses found in bats.

“These two features of the virus, the mutations in the RBD portion of the spike protein and its distinct backbone, rules out laboratory manipulation as a potential origin for SARS-CoV-2” said Andersen.

Josie Golding, PhD, epidemics lead at UK-based Wellcome Trust, said the findings by Andersen and his colleagues are “crucially important to bring an evidence-based view to the rumors that have been circulating about the origins of the virus (SARS-CoV-2) causing COVID-19.”

“They conclude that the virus is the product of natural evolution,” Goulding adds, “ending any speculation about deliberate genetic engineering.”

So where did the virus come from and how did it learn to infect humans instead of bats? Scientists say that it could have happened through one of two scenarios.

In the first scenario, the virus simply evolved through natural selection and learned how to jump from non-human creatures to humans. This is how previous outbreaks of coronavirus have played out. Scientists think it is likely that humans that came into contact with bats is how the outbreak started, considering the similarity to coronavirus normally found in the species.

In the second scenario, scientists propose that a non-pathogenic version of the virus jumped from an animal host into a human host and then evolved into its current form while inside of the body.

While both scenario’s are possible, co-author of the study don’t know which one is more likely at this point. If the SARS-CoV-2(Covid-19) entered humans in its current pathogenic form from an animal source, it raises the probability of future outbreaks, as the illness-causing strain of the virus could still be circulating in the animal population and might once again jump into humans, according to the study.