Three unknown scientists claim SARS-CoV-2 has some genetic features that they say would appear if the virus had been stitched together by some form of engineering. It is unclear yet whether this is accurate
-2 might have been engineered. But Dr Marillonnet also said that there are arguments against this hypothesis. One of them is the tiny length of one of the six fragments, something that “does not seem logical to me”.
The other point Dr Marillonnet makes is that it is not necessary for the restriction sites to have been present in the final sequence. “Why would people introduce and leave sites in the genome when it is not needed?” he wondered. Previous arguments in support of the possibility of a lab leak have stressed that a manipulated virus would not need to have any such tell-tales.
Erik van Nimwegen, from the University of Basel, says there are only small scraps of information and it is “hard to pull anything definitive out of that”. He adds, “one cannot really exclude at all that such a constellation of sites may have occurred by chance”. The authors of the paper concede this is the case. Kristian Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology, at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, described the pattern, on Twitter, as “random noise”.