Dr Polly Hayes, Senior Lecturer on the Biomedical Sciences BSc Honours course, has written an article for The Conversation about how scientists know that SARS-CoV-2 came from bats and was not made in a lab.
Dr Hayes wrote: “One of the conspiracy theories that have plagued attempts to keep people informed during the pandemic is the idea that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory. But the vast majority of scientists who have studied the virus agree that it evolved naturally and crossed into humans from an animal species, most likely a bat.”
She later wrote: “The genetic makeup or “genome” of SARS-CoV-2 has been sequenced and publicly shared thousands of times by scientists all over the world. If the virus had been genetically engineered in a lab there would be signs of manipulation in the genome data. This would include evidence of an existing viral sequence as the backbone for the new virus, and obvious, targeted inserted (or deleted) genetic elements.”
Read the full article on The Conversation website.
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