Scientists Call That New Paper About Intentional Release of SARS-CoV-2 "Poppycock"
A strange new paper claiming the coronavirus was a "laboratory product" quietly made its way into a repository of preliminary research on Monday.
"The laboratory creation of this coronavirus is convenient and can be accomplished in approximately six months," the paper's authors, four Chinese virologists who fled to the US earlier this year, wrote.
Li-Meng Yan, the lead author, went a step further in a Tuesday interview with the Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
She told Carlson that her government had "intentionally" released the "man-made virus" - comments that echoed a fringe conspiracy theory that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Donald Trump alluded to in May.
But a closer look at Yan and her coauthors' work shows they're affiliated with a pair of nonprofits based in New York City, the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation, that were led by the former Trump strategist Steve Bannon before his arrest in August.
Neither organisation has any history of publishing scientific or medical research, and the new paper has not been peer-reviewed by other scientists. ...
Other experts were quick to speak out against the claims in Yan's paper.
Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington biologist who first noticed the paper's connection to Bannon, called the research "bizarre and unfounded."
There's no evidence supporting the theory that the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was genetically engineered. A March study concluded based on genetic analysis that the coronavirus wasn't a hodgepodge of existing coronaviruses, as Yan and other supporters of the theory have suggested.
Those researchers wrote that their work indicated that it "is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus," adding that "the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone."
On Tuesday, the lead author of that study, Kristian Andersen, said Yan's group had cherry-picked data in support of their conclusion, adding that it was "poppycock dressed up as 'science.'" ...