Dr. Stephen Quay and Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller revealed the findings in The
Wall Street Journal Sunday, noting that “The most compelling reason to favor the lab leak hypothesis is firmly based in science.”
The scientists added that “COVID-19 has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus.”
The research points to the genome sequencing of the virus ‘CGG-CGG’, which is one of 36 sequencing patterns observed, but does not occur in nature.
“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,” the scientists assert.
“A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus,” they add, while also noting that the CGG-CGG combination IS commonly used in ‘gain of function’ research, which is known to have been used with coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The scientists urge that those who believe COVID-19 jumped from animals to humans “must explain why it happened to pick its least favorite combination: CGG-CGG.”
They further ask for an explanation as to “Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?”
“Yes, it could have happened randomly, through mutations. But do you believe that?” the authors of the study ask, adding “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.”
