MIT postdoctoral fellow with over 10,000 citations and an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California Berkeley say the hypothesis that COVID was engineered in a laboratory is “firmly based in science.”
The “rare and unnatural combination” genetic sequence found in the COVID-19 virus provides “damning” evidence that “the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape,” according to Dr. Steven Quay and Professor Richard Muller.
Steven Quay (MD, PhD)—trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the Chemistry Department at MIT (Massachusettes Institute of Technology)—has over 360 published contributions to medicine and has been cited over 10,000 times, placing him in the top 1% of scientists worldwide, according to PR Newswire. He holds 87 US patents and has invented seven FDA-approved pharmaceuticals which have helped over 80 million people.
Richard A. Muller (PhD) is an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California Berkeley and a former senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Muller has publications in Scientific American, Physics Today, Nature, and Science.
These scientists revealed in a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) publication that the COVID-19 virus has a “genetic footprint” that has “never been observed in a natural coronavirus.”
“In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus,” state Quay and Muller.
This “double CGG” is suppressed naturally but common in laboratory work. In fact, Quay and Muller explain that the double CGG sequence is the “sequence of choice” in lab work because it’s “readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it.” Moreover, the double CGG creates a useful “beacon” allowing scientists to “track” the insertion in the lab.
“Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?” ask the doctors.
The doctors critique a natural, or, zoonotic origin for COVID as difficult to believe because it is unlikely that random mutations would result in such sequencing.
“Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that? At the minimum, this fact—that the coronavirus, with all its random possibilities, took the rare and unnatural combination used by human researchers—implies that the leading theory for the origin of the coronavirus must be laboratory escape,” they say.
But Quay and Muller claim there is “additional scientific evidence that points to CoV-2’s gain-of-function origin,” the most compelling of which is the “dramatic differences in the genetic diversity of CoV-2, compared with the coronaviruses responsible for SARS and MERS.”
“Both of those were confirmed to have a natural origin; the viruses evolved rapidly as they spread through the human population, until the most contagious forms dominated. Covid-19 didn’t work that way. It appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version. No serious viral ‘improvement’ took place until a minor variation occurred many months later in England,” the scientists say.
“Such early optimization is unprecedented, and it suggests a long period of adaptation that predated its public spread. Science knows of only one way that could be achieved: simulated natural evolution, growing the virus on human cells until the optimum is achieved. That is precisely what is done in gain-of-function research,” they add.
Doctors Quay and Muller conclude the WSJ piece by reiterating that the double CGG sequence is “strong evidence of gene splicing” and that the absence of COVID’s diversity “suggests gain-of-function acceleration.”
“The scientific evidence points to the conclusion that the virus was developed in a laboratory.”
Although Dr. Anthony Fauci publicly rejected the lab origin hypothesis, his email recently obtained via FOIA (Freedom of Information) request reveal that he was not only aware of the possibility of a man-made origin of COVID but also working behind the scenes to discredit the theory because the U.S. financed some of the lab’s research at Fauci’s behest.
President Donald Trump said he’d seen evidence that gave him a “high degree of confidence” the novel coronavirus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China as early as April of 2020.
Jon Fleetwood is Managing Editor for American Faith.
