OTTAWA, Oct. 13 (Xinhua) – The theory that SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19, was created in the laboratory remains unlikely, a Canadian virologist said in a recent episode of the show. CANADALAND.
“There is no chance” that RaTG13, a coronavirus discovered years ago in a mine in China’s Yunnan province (southwest), is a possible progenitor of SARS-CoV-2, said Angela Rasmussen, virologist at the University of Saskatchewan, specifying that the difference of 4% between the two viruses is enormous, which means that its genome would have had to undergo more than 1,000 different mutations to achieve it.
Likewise, it is “technically very difficult” for someone to insert more than 1,000 point mutations into the genome of a progenitor virus, she added.
“This is a conspiratorial theory for which we have no proof,” she said, referring to the hypothesis that the Wuhan Institute of Virology could have kept a virus closer SARS-CoV-2.
A zoonotic origin remains the most likely source, Rasmussen added. End
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