Discussing the suspicions the virus SARS-CoV-2 that causes the COVID-19 disease is artificial would be senseless, because a number of processes that might support either point of view are impossible to trace, the director of the Ye. I. Martsynovsky Institute of Medical Parasitology and Tropical and Vector Borne Diseases, Alexander Lukashev, said at a Russian-Belarussian conference entitled Coronavirus Infection: Fundamental, Clinical and Epidemiological Aspects, TASS reports.
Lukashev recalled the active media discussion SARS-CoV-2 might have artificial origin. For those whose job is to conduct research into coronaviruses there can be no such question, Lukashev said, because the penetration of another coronavirus into the human population is merely a rerun of a regular process that occurred many times in the past.
“I believe that discussing this issue makes no sense at all, because most of the scenarios are unprovable in principle,” Lukashev said.
He explained that certain types of work that are possible in principle cannot be identified and traced. For instance, this is true of breeding a natural virus in a laboratory, or adaptation of modification of an unknown natural virus, or of making an artificial chimera of previously unknown natural viruses.
“Such experiments might have been quite logical. Scientists studying the mechanisms of how viruses emerge would’ve logically made such tests. The results of such experiments are unidentifiable at the molecular level. When we are told that the virus was certainly created or certainly not created, I believe the correct answer is neither cannot be proven. Secondly, when some begin to speculate if such a virus can or cannot be invented, the answer should be the current techniques do not allow for this. As far as adaptation is concerned, it is real in principle,” Lukashev said.
