onspiracy theories claiming COVID-19 was engineered in a lab as part of a biological attack on the United States have been gaining traction online in recent weeks, but a new study on the origins of the virus has concluded that the pandemic-causing strain developed naturally.
An analysis of the evidence, according to the findings first published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine, shows that the novel coronavirus “is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” with the researchers concluding “we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”
“There’s a lot of speculation and conspiracy theories that went to a pretty high level,” Dr. Robert Garry, a professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine and one of the authors of the study, told ABC News, “so we felt it was important to get a team together to examine evidence of this new coronavirus to determine what we could about the origin.”
Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, supported the study’s findings, writing on his blog, “This study leaves little room to refute a natural origin for COVID-19.”
Researchers concluded that the novel coronavirus is not a human creation because it does not share any “previously used virus backbone.” It likely arose, the study said, from a recombination of a virus found in bats and another virus, possibly originating from pangolins, otherwise known as scaly anteaters.
