A scientist claims there is evidence that coronavirus was manipulated by a Chinese laboratory.

By Paul Martin.

The coronavirus that causes Covid-19 contains artificially inserted “key elements” that show it was interfered with by Chinese scientists, a Norwegian scientist has claimed.

The implication is that a research laboratory in Wuhan had produced the amended virus, and it had escaped from the Wuhan’s Virology Institute. China has strongly denied the allegations.

The Norwegian scientist said he had discovered “inserted sections placed on the SARS-CoV-2 Spike surface” through which the virus binds itself to human cells.

The prevailing view of scientists and most of Europe’s politicians has been that the virus spread from animals, to infect a human or humans, probably via an animal sold in a ‘wet market’ of wild creatures in the Chinese city.

A statistical examination by correspondent.world, published on its website on June 2, showed that the virus was extremely likely to have emerged from the Wuhan virology laboratory.

The scientist made the comments to Norwegian television, but the same claim is not made in a scientific paper he and two others had prepared for publication.

This research paper, by Professor Angus Dalgleish, of St George’s Hospital at the University of London, and the Norwegian virologist Birger Sorensen, has been accepted for publication in a respected American scientific journal – but only after the authors had been forced to tone down their paper and remove direct accusations against the Chinese regime. The third author, the Norwegian military’s scientific adviser, withdrew his name from the research paper.

Entitled “A Reconstructed Historical Aetiology of the SARS-CoV-2 Spike”, the new study was revealed in The Telegraph, suggests the virus is “remarkably well-adapted virus for human co-existence”. That draft of the paper, seen by The telegraph, said it was likely to have been the result of a Wuhan laboratory experiment to produce “chimeric viruses of high potency”.

According to the Telegraph report, further analysis produced by Professor Dalgleish and his colleagues, due for release in the coming days, claims the Covid-19 virus has “unique fingerprints” that cannot have evolved naturally and are instead “indicative of purposive manipulation”.

The Norwegian-British research team claimed to have discovered clues within Covid-19’s genetic sequence. It said key elements were “inserted”, according to the report.

“We are aware that these findings could have political significance and raise troubling questions,” the authors originally wrote.   The paper was widely circulated behind the scenes after being distributed for peer review, while intelligence officials reportedly examined its findings. 

However, one of the authors, John Fredrik Moxnes, the chief scientific adviser to the Norwegian military, asked for his name to be withdrawn from the research, throwing its credibility into doubt.

A few days after the Telegraph story was published, NRK published an article in which they spoke to the co-author of the paper, Dr Sørensen, about the origins of the new coronavirus. It reported that “according to the researchers [Sørensen and Dagleish] sequences in this protein may indicate that the virus does not have a natural origin.”

The published paper is about vaccine development, whilst the second “goes deeper into the question of whether the virus is man-made” and is yet to be published, said Dr Sorenson.

Several corrections now appear at the top of that NRK article, including the clarification that the claim that “sequences in the coronavirus spike protein appear to be artificially inserted” was not from the research article but “based on statements from Sørensen to NRK”.