DISINFO: COVID-19 is a mixture of coronavirus and HIV

Conspiracy theory about the 2019-nCoV coronavirus. There is no evidence to suggest that the virus was man-made inside laboratories, let alone that it is a pretext for enforced vaccination, which is another common conspiracy theory about COVID-19. For example, the medical Journal “Emerging Microbes & Infections” specifically says there is “No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering”.

The claim that the COVID-19 contains artificially-introduced insertions from the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), thereby proving it is man-made, is based on a preprint of a research study uploaded to bioRXiV on 2 February 2020. The paper, titled "Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag", has not been peer-reviewed and was soon withdrawn by the authors after the study received extensive criticism from other scientists and the genetic information that had matched turned out to be common in many other organisms.

Criticism of the study’s findings by experts has been published in several other outlets. In this Forbes article, Arinjay Banerjee, a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University who has studied coronaviruses, said that:

"The authors compared very short regions of proteins in the novel coronavirus and concluded that the small segments of proteins were similar to segments in HIV proteins. Comparing very short segments can often generate false positives and it is difficult to make these conclusions using small protein segments."

Trevor Bedford, a faculty member at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who studies viral evolution, re-analysed the gene and protein sequences used by the authors and found that the so-called “unique” inserts appeared in many other organisms, including Cryptosporidium and Plasmodium malariae, which cause cryptosporidiosis and malaria, respectively.

Assistant professor at Stanford University Silvana Konermann also checked the authors’ findings and came to the same conclusion, calling the similarity “spurious”.

See further debunk by Radio - Canada (in French).

You can see other examples of this narrative in our database, such as claims that Bill Gates and George Soros are sponsoring the coronavirus, that it is a UK, US or NATO creation and that the Americans have its cure, that it is an artificial disease which specifically targets Chinese DNA, that it was created with economic goals while big pharma companies are spreading panic for their own profit, that it is a biological weapon against Russia and China, that it will wipe out Ukraine’s population in a few days or that it was predicted by Nostradamus and others.