Scientists that believe COVID-19 may have an unnatural origin

Richard Ebright
RICHARD H. EBRIGHT
Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Rutgers University

…the 2019-nCoV data are consistent with entry into the human population as either a natural accident or a laboratory accident.

January 2020

Michael Antoniou
Professor of Medical & Molecular Genetics, King's College London, UK

…the fact that SARS-CoV-2 doesn’t have the same RBD amino acid sequence as the one that the computer program predicted in no way rules out the possibility that it was genetically engineered.

April 2020

DAVID RELMAN
Professor of Microbiology, Immunology, and Medicine, Stanford University

SARS-CoV-2 could have spent some time in a laboratory before encountering humans…All scientists need to acknowledge a simple fact: Humans are fallible, and laboratory accidents happen — far more often than we care to admit.

May 2021

Bernard Roizman
Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Virology, University of Chicago

I’m convinced that what happened is that the virus was brought to a lab, they started to work with it…and some sloppy individual brought it out, …They can’t admit they did something so stupid.

May 2021

DAVID BALTIMORE
President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Biology, California Institute of Technology

…within the SARS-CoV-2 genome there is an insertion of 12 nucleotides that is entirely foreign to the beta-coronavirus class of virus that SARS-CoV-2 is in…

 

…you want to know were there people in the virology laboratory in Wuhan who were manipulating viral genetic sequences? It’s really a question of history: What happened?

 

…it seemed to me a reasonable hypothesis that somebody had put it in there. Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I do know that it’s a hypothesis that must be taken seriously.

June 2021

NIKOLAI PETROVSKY
Professor of Medicine and Public Health, Flinders University, Australia

Spike protein exhibited the highest binding to human (h)ACE2 of all the species tested. These findings show that the earliest known SARS-CoV-2 isolates were surprisingly well adapted to bind strongly to human ACE2, helping explain its efficient human to human respiratory transmission.

June 2021

 

Robert Redfield
ROBERT REDFIELD
former Director of The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathogen in Wuhan was from a laboratory, you know, escaped.

June 2021

 

The potential for conspiracy is really on the other side. The conspiracy is Collins, Fauci, and the established scientific community that has acted in an antithetical way to science.

September 2022

 

Alina Chan
ALINA CHAN
Scientific Advisor at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University

I think a lab origin is more likely than a natural origin at this point.
(after the DEFUSE proposal was leaked)

December 2021

Neil Harrison
NEIL L. HARRISON
Professor of Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Columbia University

In fact, the assertion that the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 has an unusual, nonstandard amino acid sequence is false. The amino acid sequence of the FCS in SARS-CoV-2 also exists in the human ENaC α subunit, where it is known to be functional and has been extensively studied.

May 2022

Stuart Newman
Stuart Newman
Professor of Cell Biology and Anatomy, New York Medical College

SARS-CoV-2 is either an evolutionary anomaly or a chimera, since no other sarbecovirus has a furin cleavage site. If an anomaly, why did it emerge in a city with a lab working on bat coronaviruses? The lab had grant proposals to insert such sites, favoring the chimera hypothesis.

July 2022

Nick Patterson
Senior computational biologist, Medical and Population Genetics Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

So I think that molecular biologists have by accident caused a planetary disaster. It is of the utmost importance to have regulations that help prevent this happening again.

October 2022

Deborah Birx
Deborah Birx
USA global AIDS coordinator for presidents Obama and Trump

It would be a one-in-a-million, one-in-a-billion chance that it came out of an animal able to infect humans at this rate.

February 2023

Adrien Gibbs
Adrien Gibbs
Emeritus Professor of Virology, Australian National University

At present, there is, I believe, no evidence of a zoonotic chain linking bats to Wuhan, but there is clear evidence that SARS-COV-2 is probably a product of genetic manipulation.

May 2023

Jesse Bloom
Jesse D. Bloom
Professor, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center; Howard Hughes Medical Institute

It was the moment for me when the possibility that the furin cleavage site was engineered went from a seemingly low possibility to a completely plausible possibility.

July 2023

Don Newmeyer
Emeritus Professor for Allergy and Immunology at La Jolla Institute

Absolutely, the viral genome sequence is a smoking gun for lab manipulation. Add to that the other circumstantial evidence (EcoHealth and Ralph Baric and DOD grant applications, etc), plus the ease of lab accident, it’s obvious.

July 2023

Karol Sikora
Founding Dean, University of Buckingham Medical School; Ex-director WHO Cancer Programme

My view is that it’s almost 100% likely COVID originated from the Wuhan lab – as it has been for some time. We’ve witnessed essentially a cover up from large parts of the international medical community. The question is now not what was covered up, but why it was covered up?

July 2023