Rare genome sequence ‘proves’ Covid came from a lab: Doctors

A long-anticipated report claims Covid-19’s rare genome sequencing, not found in nature, almost certainly proves it came from a laboratory.

A rare sequence of genomes unseen in nature but found by scientists in the Covid-19 coronavirus almost certainly proves that it came from a lab, according to a long-anticipated report by two leading experts in the field.

According to the research by Drs Stephen Quay, CEO of biopharmaceutical company Atossa Therapeutics Inc, and Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California Berkeley, an analysis of the coronavirus’s DNA found a segment sequence known as CGG-CGG which has never been found naturally in any other coronavirus.

A worker inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan in 2017. Picture: Johannes Eisele/AFP

This sequence, they said, allows the coronavirus’s spike protein (which binds it to human cells, enabling infection) to be activated by a common enzyme, making it better at attacking nearby cells and therefore more infectious and dangerous.

“A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus,” Quay and Muller wrote in their study, which the pair described in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

“The CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here.”

Emails reveal Dr Anthony Fauci was warned early in the pandemic the virus may have come from a lab. Picture: Jeenah Moon/Getty Images/AFP

According to the authors of the study, the fact that the sequence is found in the coronavirus when it doesn’t occur in related viruses like SARS and MERS means that those who believe it occurred naturally must explain how that might have happened.

“Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it.”

Therefore, they write, those who maintain that the coronavirus originated in nature and made the jump to humans “must explain why it happened to pick its least favourite combination: CGG-CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?”, they write.

“Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact — that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers — implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape,” the pair concluded.

The news comes as pressure mounts for a fuller accounting of the coronavirus’s origins, as well as the release of a trove of emails from top US medico Dr Anthony Fauci revealing that he was warned early in the pandemic that the virus may have in fact come from a lab, even as he publicly maintained that it almost surely came from a natural source, most likely bats.