Netizens Believe French Scientist After He Reveals COVID A Man-Made Disease

Netizens react after a 2008 Nobel Prize recipient for discovering the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has weighed in on the controversy about the origin of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and insisted that it is laboratory-made.

Four days prior to US President Donald Trump’s threat of new tariffs against Beijing, claiming there is evidence linking the coronavirus to a lab in China’s ground-zero city of Wuhan, French scientist Luc Montagnier who discovered HIV said COVID-19 was a creation of an expert, the GMA News reported.

Interviewed on the CNews channel in France, Montagnier believed that the virus had been designed by molecular biologists, stating that it contains genetic elements of HIV and that its characteristics could not have arisen naturally.

When asked by the CNews interviewer what the goal of these molecular biologists could be, Montagnier said it wasn’t clear.

“My job is to expose the facts,” the French scientist said.

Further, Montagnier said that “he didn’t know who had done it, or why,” but suggested that possibly the goal had been to make an AIDS vaccine.

“There’s a part which is obviously the classic virus, and there’s another mainly coming from the bat, but that part has added sequences, particularly from HIV–the AIDS virus,” he said.

Montagnier concluded that the allegedly man-made virus, whose genome consists of a “clockwork of sequences” and includes elements of HIV, could not have been assembled by amateurs.

And questions about its origin and purpose would not escape scrutiny and are unlikely to disappear soon.

However, other experts are not buying Montagnier’s explanation, with one even calling it “absurd.”

Virologist Etienne Simon-Lorière from the Pasteur Institute in Paris said suggesting that the virus was man-made because of the “small... pieces of genomes” in it that are anyway found in other viruses of the same family simply “does not make sense.”

He said the genome pieces found in the SARS-CoV-2 “actually look like lots of sequences in the genetic material of bacteria, viruses, and plants... If we take a word from a book and that word resembles that of another book, can we say that one has copied from the other?”

Others noted that the paper cited by Montagnier to back up his theory and published by researchers in India was not peer-reviewed and had already been withdrawn by its authors.

Meanwhile, the majority of netizens on social media express their mixed reactions believing the French scientist that the virus created inside a laboratory while others think that the virus came from China.