DISINFO: US created Coronavirus back in 2015
SUMMARY
Chinese experts discovered in the archive an article published in 2015 in the “Nature Medicine” journal, which confirms that the US scientists have been able to create a new type of Coronavirus, which has a direct impact on humans.
RESPONSE
Conspiracy theory with no evidence given, based on recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives about biological weapons and that the outbreak of COVID-19 coronavirus being man-made, in this case, by the Americans. There is no basis to the claim that the 2019-nCoV coronavirus is man-made. Volume 9 of medical Journal “Emerging Microbes & Infections” published a study in 2020 entitled “No credible evidence supporting claims of the laboratory engineering of SARS-CoV-2” in which rumours about the epidemic being constructed inside laboratories are clearly dismissed. Regarding the 2015 study mentioned in the article, this is also addressed in the medical Journal as follows:
“Another claim in Chinese social media points to a Nature Medicine paper published in 2015, which reports the construction of a chimeric CoV with a bat CoV S gene (SHC014) in the backbone of a SARS CoV that has adapted to infect mice (MA15) and is capable of infecting human cells. However, this claim lacks any scientific basis and must be discounted because of significant divergence in the genetic sequence of this construct with the new SARS-CoV-2 (>5,000 nucleotides)”.