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A Chinese virologist is currently circulating on social media that the coronavirus was produced by China in a laboratory and deliberately released. The global scientific community vehemently disagrees. “The data was unilaterally interpreted. Anything that speaks against his hypothesis was simply not taken into account,” said Friedemann Weber, a virologist at the University of Giessen.
Li-Meng Yan, a Chinese whistleblower who has since left her homeland, uploaded her thesis to a server for so-called preprints in mid-September, for a work that has not yet been reviewed by other researchers and published in a specialized journal. “What’s in there doesn’t stand up to scientific review,” Weber complained. On the US station Fox News Yan extended his claim: Sars-CoV-2 was not only produced artificially, it was also released intentionally.
“The virus would look different”
Weber’s judgment coincides with that of fellow specialists. Virologist Stephan Ludwig from Münster sees Yan’s trial as a “mixture of data and assumptions.” He refers to a study from the journal Nature. Its authors concluded in March that the virus was unlikely to be produced in the laboratory. According to Weber, this is due to the structure of the junction point between the virus and the cell: “If you wanted to build a virus like this on purpose, it would look different.”
Frank Hufert, a virologist at Brandenburg Medical School, gives Yan’s statement that China deliberately released the virus, and another thing to consider: “There is no vaccine or therapy for this disease in China either,” he said. “I don’t see any reason why you should start an outbreak in your own country and thus endanger people and the economy.”
Numerous other researchers, for example from Great Britain, France and the United States, criticized the contribution as unscientific. Twitter has now blocked the virologist’s controversial account.
