The origin of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 is not natural, Norwegian scientist Birger Sørensen has claimed.
The co-author of the British-Norwegian study indicated in the "Quarterly Review of Biophysics" was backed by Richard Dearlove, the former head of Britain's MI6.
Dearlove stated that he thinks the novel coronavirus pandemic could have originated as an accident, with the virus escaping from a lab in China.
According to the researchers, they have detected clues alluding that key elements were included in the coronavirus' genetic sequence. However, the published study does not seem to tell that the inserts were man-made.
It could have been transmitted from a Wuhan lab in China during an accident, the former leader of Britain's foreign intelligence service said to The Telegraph.
According to the chief of MI6 from 1999 to 2004, he proposed that a biosecurity malfunction could have caused the virus fleeing during a gene-splicing experiment on bat coronaviruses, Taiwan News reported.
The roots of the coronavirus may not come from a Wuhan wet market, wherein it had initially been proposed that it was transmitted from bats to humans.
The debatable study by British and Norwegian researchers includes John Fredrik Moxnes, a chief scientific adviser to the Norwegian military, and Prof. Angus Dalgleish of St. George's at the University of London.
The authors discovered that the coronavirus' spike protein consists of seemingly artificially inserted sequences. Sørensen spoke to the NRK, "The inserted sequences should never have been published. Had it been today, it would never have happened. It was a big mistake the Chinese made. The inserted sequences have a functionality that we describe. We explain why they are essential. But the Chinese pointed to them first."
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The coronavirus had been engineered to be tethered to humans, according to the researchers. They said it was barely mutated since humans contracted it, alluding that the virus was already fully-adjusted to humans.
Prior to its publishing, the research had been denied by numerous journals and revised many times to clear out alleging claims about China.
Early co-author John Fredrik Moxnes, a chief scientific adviser to the military in Norway, apparently requested for his name to be eliminated.
The scientific discovery is wont to elevate the likelihood of China to compensate for the fatalities and economic turmoil wreaked upon the globe. This coincides with Beijing tackling rising pressure to accurately demonstrate how the coronavirus first prevailed in late 2019.
The study further illustrated the rationale for the creation of Biovacc-19, a potential vaccine for the coronavirus undergoing advanced pre-clinical development.
Sørensen stated that the coronavirus has components that vary much from SARS and have not been detected in nature before.
China and the US have joined forces for several years.
Sørensen declared that both nations engage in "gain of function" studies. This is wherein the transmissibility of potential pandemic pathogens or pathogenicity can be improved in order for them to be more perceptible.
Rumors have endured for months that the coronavirus was developed in Wuhan's advanced virology laboratory.
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