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DISINFO: HIV was found in the Coronavirus, hence it was engineered

DISINFORMATION CASE DETAILS

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coronavirus Virus / bacteria threat Biological weapons Conspiracy theory

DISINFO: HIV was found in the Coronavirus, hence it was engineered

SUMMARY

The Coronavirus was created inside a laboratory, especially as HIV particles (AIDS) were found inside it.

RESPONSE

Recurring conspiracy theory about the novel coronavirus. There is no evidence to suggest that the virus was fabricated inside laboratories. The expert scientific consensus holds that the coronavirus has natural origins; there is no credible evidence supporting claims of 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The paper, titled "Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag", has not been peer-reviewed and was soon withdrawn by the authors after the study received extensive criticism from other scientists and the genetic information that had matched turned out to be common in many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 thatBill Gates andGeorge Soros are sponsoring the coronavirus, that it is aUK,US orNATO creation and that the Americans haveits cure, that it isan artificial disease which specificallytargets Chinese DNA, that it was createdwith economic goals whilebig pharma companies are spreading panic for their own profit, that it is a biological weaponagainst Russia and China, that it willwipe out Ukraine’s population in a few days or that it was predicted byNostradamus and others.

Disclaimer

Cases in the EUvsDisinfo database focus on messages in the international information space that are identified as providing a partial, distorted, or false depiction of reality and spread key pro-Kremlin messages. This does not necessarily imply, however, that a given outlet is linked to the Kremlin or editorially pro-Kremlin, or that it has intentionally sought to disinform. EUvsDisinfo publications do not represent an official EU position, as the information and opinions expressed are based on media reporting and analysis of the East Stratcom Task Force.

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