Posted on Sept. 17, 2020We are collaborating with FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, in an effort to identify misinformation and to ensure news consumers get the facts. This story first appeared on FactCheck.org.A long-circulating, unsubstantiated claim about the origins of the novel coronavirus resurfaced in recent days after a paper published online purported that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab.The baseless claim which we first addressed in the early days of the pandemic was further amplified when Fox News host Tucker Carlson featured an interview with one of the authors of the paper on his show on Sept. 15.That segment was viewed on YouTube nearly 2 million times and that link alone was shared by more nearly 50,000 users on Facebook, according to CrowdTangle analytics data, where other popular posts also repeated the allegations.But experts say the new paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, does not prove that the virus was created in a lab.The paper was uploaded to an open-access website Sept. 14 and was published by the Rule of Law Society & Rule of Law Foundation two related entities in New York tied to Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump. Bannon is listed as the chair of the Rule of Law Society in a registration document filed last year with the state.The organizations are connected to a partnership forged by Bannon and Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese businessman, that has been described as being based on their shared disdain for the Chinese government. Guo is wanted in China on charges of bribery and fraud allegations he has denied according to The New York Times. Bannon announced in November 2018 that Guo would be setting up a $100 million Rule of Law fund in part to aid Chinese dissidents and their families.Guos work in the U.S., including consulting services from Bannon, has drawn the interest of federal investigators, The Wall Street Journal has reported.Rossen Reports: Busting COVID-19 myths with experiments you can try at homeThe new paper attempts to make the case that the novel coronavirus couldnt have come from nature and instead may have been created by altering a previously discovered bat coronavirus. But several of its main points rest on faulty conclusions.One of the studys main claims is that the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 is suspiciously similar to that of a bat coronavirus discovered by military laboratories in China and therefore indicates that another coronavirus was used to create the novel coronavirus.Kristian G. Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research who has studied the origins of the virus, said of the claim on Twitter: This simply cant be true there are more than 3,500 nucleotide differences between SARS-CoV-2 and these viruses.And Dr. Stanley Perlman, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa who studies coronaviruses, told us in an email that the coronavirus referenced ZC45 is only 89% related to SARS-CoV-2. In virology terms, that is very distant.Perlman said it would be nearly impossible to make the reverse genetics system needed to manipulate the virus and changing its sequence to arrive at SARS-CoV-2 would be virtually impossible since it would not be known how to manipulate the virus.Nevertheless, Dr. Li-Meng Yan one of the authors of the new paper and a virologist who has claimed she fled China to reveal the truth about COVID-19 doubled down on Carlsons show. She alleged a cover-up by the Chinese government and the scientific community.The paper goes on to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 contains a unique furin-cleavage site in its Spike protein which is completely absent in this particular class of coronaviruses found in nature and that, therefore, the virus was engineered.Susan R. Weiss, a University of Pennsylvania professor of microbiology who researches coronaviruses, told us in an email that that makes no sense in terms of what we know about coronaviruses.Among murine coronavirus strains there are viruses with the furin site and strains without closely related strains closer than SARS-1 and SARS-2 yet they are all virulent, Weiss said. So this observation says nothing to me about the virus being engineered.A furin site is a short protein sequence that can be recognized and cut by other proteins.Perlman also said furin sites are found in many coronaviruses and finding it does not surprise us in the field.The paper also argues a conspiracy is afoot by claiming that scientific journals wont publish the alternative theory that the virus may have come from a research laboratory.I dont believe that, Weiss said. It is just that the data is not compelling. I dont know any CoV researchers that believe this at all. There is no way anyone could figure out how to make a virus behave like SARS-2 asymptomatic spread for thing.In March, Andersen and other scientists concluded in an article in Nature Medicine that the novel coronavirus is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus. The authors said that the virus likely originated in one of two ways: natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer, meaning before the spread of disease from animals to humans, or natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.The Nature Medicine article did say it couldnt rule out an accidental laboratory release of the naturally occurring virus, but its authors said they do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.The new, dubious paper attempts to discredit those findings by saying the Nature Medicine studys authors show signs of conflict of interests, raising further concerns on the credibility of this publication.The supposed support for that allegation: that one of the authors, Columbia Universitys Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, received an award from China for his work on public health there following the 2003 outbreak of the coronavirus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.The new paper also references the curriculum vitae of another author Edward C. Holmes, a researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia which shows that he has collaborated with scientists and organizations in China.espite the online lies and malicious editing of my Wikipedia page, I have never received any funds from China, personal or research, and have no grants with Chinese scientists. I do have some honorary appointments there and a nice certificate though, Holmes wrote on Twitter. I do work closely with some Chinese scientists and as that directly led to the first release of the genome sequence that might just perhaps possibly be argued to be a good thing.Andersen also said that the allegation about the authors being conflicted was wrong. y lab has never received funding from China and we have no collaborations with Chinese investigators. I have no financial interests in China, he said in a tweet. All our analyses are scientific and unbiased.Its worth noting that collaborations between researchers in the U.S. and China arent uncommon. A recent study published in Higher Education found that U.S. research output between 2014 and 2018 would have dropped without Chinese partnerships while Chinas output would have grown regardless of work with the U.S. he findings demonstrate that the USA has more to lose than gain in cutting ties with China, its authors wrote.Public health officials have also suggested the virus originated in bats.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said: The SARS-CoV-2 virus is a betacoronavirus, like MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV. All three of these viruses have their origins in bats. The sequences from U.S. patients are similar to the one that China initially posted, suggesting a likely single, recent emergence of this virus from an animal reservoir. However, the exact source of this virus is unknown.And in April, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement that the Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified. The intelligence community, it said, will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told National Geographic in a May interview, If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and whats out there now, is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that evolved in nature and then jumped species, Fauci said.Jessica McDonald contributed to this article.Editors note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here.

Posted on Sept. 17, 2020

We are collaborating with FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, in an effort to identify misinformation and to ensure news consumers get the facts. This story first appeared on FactCheck.org.

A long-circulating, unsubstantiated claim about the origins of the novel coronavirus resurfaced in recent days after a paper published online purported that SARS-CoV-2 was created in a lab.

The baseless claim which we first addressed in the early days of the pandemic was further amplified when Fox News host Tucker Carlson featured an interview with one of the authors of the paper on his show on Sept. 15.

That segment was viewed on YouTube nearly 2 million times and that link alone was shared by more nearly 50,000 users on Facebook, according to CrowdTangle analytics data, where other popular posts also repeated the allegations.

But experts say the new paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, does not prove that the virus was created in a lab.

The paper was uploaded to an open-access website Sept. 14 and was published by the Rule of Law Society & Rule of Law Foundation two related entities in New York tied to Steve Bannon, a former adviser to President Donald Trump. Bannon is listed as the chair of the Rule of Law Society in a registration document filed last year with the state.

The organizations are connected to a partnership forged by Bannon and Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese businessman, that has been described as being based on their shared disdain for the Chinese government. Guo is wanted in China on charges of bribery and fraud allegations he has denied according to The New York Times. Bannon announced in November 2018 that Guo would be setting up a $100 million Rule of Law fund in part to aid Chinese dissidents and their families.

Guos work in the U.S., including consulting services from Bannon, has drawn the interest of federal investigators, The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Rossen Reports: Busting COVID-19 myths with experiments you can try at home

The new paper attempts to make the case that the novel coronavirus couldnt have come from nature and instead may have been created by altering a previously discovered bat coronavirus. But several of its main points rest on faulty conclusions.

One of the studys main claims is that the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 is suspiciously similar to that of a bat coronavirus discovered by military laboratories in China and therefore indicates that another coronavirus was used to create the novel coronavirus.

Kristian G. Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research who has studied the origins of the virus, said of the claim on Twitter: This simply cant be true there are more than 3,500 nucleotide differences between SARS-CoV-2 and these viruses.

This content is imported from Twitter.You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

And Dr. Stanley Perlman, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa who studies coronaviruses, told us in an email that the coronavirus referenced ZC45 is only 89% related to SARS-CoV-2. In virology terms, that is very distant.

Perlman said it would be nearly impossible to make the reverse genetics system needed to manipulate the virus and changing its sequence to arrive at SARS-CoV-2 would be virtually impossible since it would not be known how to manipulate the virus.

Nevertheless, Dr. Li-Meng Yan one of the authors of the new paper and a virologist who has claimed she fled China to reveal the truth about COVID-19 doubled down on Carlsons show. She alleged a cover-up by the Chinese government and the scientific community.

The paper goes on to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 contains a unique furin-cleavage site in its Spike protein which is completely absent in this particular class of coronaviruses found in nature and that, therefore, the virus was engineered.

Susan R. Weiss, a University of Pennsylvania professor of microbiology who researches coronaviruses, told us in an email that that makes no sense in terms of what we know about coronaviruses.

Among murine coronavirus strains there are viruses with the furin site and strains without closely related strains closer than SARS-1 and SARS-2 yet they are all virulent, Weiss said. So this observation says nothing to me about the virus being engineered.

A furin site is a short protein sequence that can be recognized and cut by other proteins.

Perlman also said furin sites are found in many coronaviruses and finding it does not surprise us in the field.

The paper also argues a conspiracy is afoot by claiming that scientific journals wont publish the alternative theory that the virus may have come from a research laboratory.

I dont believe that, Weiss said. It is just that the data is not compelling. I dont know any CoV researchers that believe this at all. There is no way anyone could figure out how to make a virus behave like SARS-2 asymptomatic spread for [one] thing.

In March, Andersen and other scientists concluded in an article in Nature Medicine that the novel coronavirus is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus. The authors said that the virus likely originated in one of two ways: natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer, meaning before the spread of disease from animals to humans, or natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.

The Nature Medicine article did say it couldnt rule out an accidental laboratory release of the naturally occurring virus, but its authors said they do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.

The new, dubious paper attempts to discredit those findings by saying the Nature Medicine studys authors show signs of conflict of interests, raising further concerns on the credibility of this publication.

The supposed support for that allegation: that one of the authors, Columbia Universitys Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, received an award from China for his work on public health there following the 2003 outbreak of the coronavirus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

The new paper also references the curriculum vitae of another author Edward C. Holmes, a researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia which shows that he has collaborated with scientists and organizations in China.

[D]espite the online lies and malicious editing of my Wikipedia page, I have never received any funds from China, personal or research, and have no grants with Chinese scientists. I do have some honorary appointments there and a nice certificate though, Holmes wrote on Twitter. I do work closely with some Chinese scientists and as that directly led to the first release of the genome sequence that might just perhaps possibly be argued to be a good thing.

Andersen also said that the allegation about the authors being conflicted was wrong. [M]y lab has never received funding from China and we have no collaborations with Chinese investigators. I have no financial interests in China, he said in a tweet. All our analyses are scientific and unbiased.

Its worth noting that collaborations between researchers in the U.S. and China arent uncommon. A recent study published in Higher Education found that U.S. research output between 2014 and 2018 would have dropped without Chinese partnerships while Chinas output would have grown regardless of work with the U.S. [T]he findings demonstrate that the USA has more to lose than gain in cutting ties with China, its authors wrote.

Public health officials have also suggested the virus originated in bats.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said: The SARS-CoV-2 virus is a betacoronavirus, like MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV. All three of these viruses have their origins in bats. The sequences from U.S. patients are similar to the one that China initially posted, suggesting a likely single, recent emergence of this virus from an animal reservoir. However, the exact source of this virus is unknown.

And in April, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement that the Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified. The intelligence community, it said, will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told National Geographic in a May interview, If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and whats out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.

Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species, Fauci said.

Jessica McDonald contributed to this article.

Editors note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media. Our previous stories can be found here.

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Report resurrects false claim that coronavirus was bioengineered - WXII The Triad