(John Ransom, Headline USA) Researchers have identified a patch of DNA in the COVID-19 virus that matches a sequence that had been previously patented by Moderna, three years before the emergence of the virus, in a coincidence called a “one in 3 trillion chance” according to the Daily Mail.
“Fresh suspicion that Covid may have been tinkered with in a lab emerged today after scientists found genetic material owned by Moderna in the virus’s spike protein,” said the Daily Mail. “They identified a tiny snippet of code that is identical to part of a gene patented by the vaccine maker three years before the pandemic.”
The report published in the journal Frontiers in Virology said that a search of the DNA string came up with a match for “US patent 9,587,003 filed on Feb. 4, 2016,” which was shown to be a patent by Moderna.
The study said that in the COVID virus, the furin cleavage site identified in the sequence is a crucial mutation for the virus to be able to infect humans, which would make sense for a patent of a biotech application made for human use.
The researchers called the match “highly unusual” and said that potential explanations for the correlation between the COVID-19 sequence and the Moderna sequence “should be further investigated.”
Several virologists contacted by the Daily Mail said that the size of the matching sequence make it likely that match is just a coincidence.
“Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist at Warwick University, admitted the latest finding was interesting but claimed it was not significant enough to suggest lab manipulation,” said the Daily Mail.
The professor noted that the match was a “very, very, very small piece made up of 19 nucleotides.”
But the government in the UK has said, at least privately, that they think the virus more likely than not came out of a lab leak.
“I think the official view [within Government] is that it is as likely as anything else to have caused the pandemic,” Cambridge bio-security fellow Hamish de Bretton–Gordon told the Telegraph over the weekend.
“A lot of people like myself think it is more likely,” de Bretton–Gordon added. “I think attitudes have changed a little bit. The zoonotic transfer theory just didn’t make sense.”
Former US Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe concurred. He suggested that acceptance of the lab-leak theory is even greater than is publicly acknowledged, perhaps because some in the intel community fear reprisal from China.
Privately, so does much of the U.S. intelligence community. As I said in my op-ed last August, “Quite simply, the lab leak theory is the only one supported by science, intelligence and common sense” https://t.co/NKdafbdUka https://t.co/D4PhPEKBxg
— John Ratcliffe (@JohnRatcliffe) February 23, 2022