The COVID-19 Coronavirus which has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) is surely going to leave a mark on the memory of anyone living within this era and many stories to tell.
Many conspiracy theories have evolved following the outbreak of the coronavirus as to who created it, the purpose for which it was created and how it was created. It would interest you to know that a larger part of the world’s population now believes that the COVID-19 coronavirus was created by some science in a laboratory as a biochemical weapon.
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Who Created the COVID-19 Coronavirus?
The truth is the novel coronavirus popularly known as COVID-19 wasn’t created in a laboratory by anyone to be used as a weapon or something. Scientists have repeatedly debunked the idea, and U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Dr. Francis Collins recently weighed in to explain why.
On 26th March, Dr. Francis pointed to a recent article in the journal Nature Medicine which indicates two possible origin stories for the coronavirus, neither of which have to do with malicious plans to bioengineer a virus.
In the first, the virus evolved the ability to infect humans while still in its natural animal host (likely bats or pangolins). In the second, the virus first made the jump from animal to human — and only then did it slowly evolve the ability to spread between humans and cause disease. “Either way,” writes Collins, “this study leaves little room to refute a natural origin for COVID-19.”
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The authors of the Nature Medicine paper, who dissected and analyzed the important features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, concluded: “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”
Meanwhile, the misinformation continues to widespread on the internet around the world. The New York Times recently reported that both China and Russia were waging disinformation campaigns to undermine the United States and its response to the pandemic.
Trump himself was angered that a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry falsely alleged that the U.S. Army had introduced the coronavirus to Wuhan, its original epicenter in China.
Harvard public health scholar and epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding, who is widely followed on Twitter for his Covid-19 updates, was accused of spreading Chinese propaganda and lies after tweeting a story summarizing the NIH blog post and the Nature Medicine paper — that was published in the South China Morning Post. Many of the allegations that were leveled against him were a reference to the conspiracy theories that were earlier on refuted by Dr. Francis Collins.
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Collins wrote ate the end of his blog post “It may not have all the answers to your questions,” he writes, “but it’s definitely a step in the right direction in helping to distinguish rumors from facts” directing readers to the new Coronavirus Rumour control website which is run by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency.
In order not to spread false rumors and information about the COVID-19 Coronavirus including coronavirus myths, kindly do your best to always cross-check any information you receive about coronavirus, from trust websites before spreading it. Misinformation is very dangerous and can cause a lot of harm than good.
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