Was the COVID-19 coronavirus engineered?

People just love the good gossip and conspiracy theories. One study published in Science journal by a team of MIT scientists who analyzed a database of every tweet posted from 2006 to 2017 demonstrated that fake news moved through Twitter further, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth. And, after all, "nothing spreads like fear" (borrowing a promotional slogan from the 2011 thriller "Contagion"). Infectious diseases have always been here with us and will always be, they are just negative externalities of us being humans.

One popular coronavirus conspiracy theory that emerged in China last week was that U.S. military athletes participating in the Military World Games in Wuhan during October 18-27, 2019 had brought the virus into China. Was the COVID-19 coronavirus really engineered in a lab? Where do all these rumors come from?

Five years ago, in November 2015, a letter was published in Nature Medicine describing an experiment that created a hybrid version of a Chinese horseshoe bat coronavirus (a virus that is closely related to the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS)). The experiment was jointly conducted by a team of scientists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences in China. American and Chinese scientists created a chimaeric virus (an engineered virus made up from the backbone of SARS and the added protein). The experiment confirmed the hypothesis of the possibility of direct human infection with this experimental horseshoe bat coronaviruses.

The new virus could infect the epithelium of the human respiratory tract, cancer cells of the lungs and uterus, as well as the epithelium of the kidney of the African green monkey. In experimental mice, the virus caused pneumonia, with the loss of up to 10% of body weight also observed in many cases. Fatal outcomes were observed rarely and only in old mice (12 months and older).

Shortly after the paper in Nature Medicine appeared, the Nature journal published a story by Declan Butler entitled “Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research” who warned against engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential stating the risks of such experiments are too high.

In March 2020, the editors’ note appeared in Nature stating: “We are aware that this story is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus”.

Some virologists claim that the virus is very specific and weird, so it might be possible it leaked from a lab as a result of a failed bio weapon experiment (even some suspicious similarities with HIV are highlighted). Other scientists disagree with that entirely. Yet, some doubts will always remain. After all, Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention is located just 300 meters away from the Hunan Seafood Market which was initially thought to be the source of the COVID-19 original outbreak. People with vivid imagination are already on high alert!

Do you think it is OK to play God and experiment with deadly viruses that have the potential to wipe out millions of people worldwide?