IIT-Delhi Scientists Withdrew Research on Evolution of SARS-CoV-2, Still Believe “Possible Laboratory Contamination Cannot be Ruled Out”
The possibility of laboratory containment of the coronavirus or lack of it cannot be ruled out, said a group of scientists from the IIT-Delhi who had conducted research on the origin of the virus. The scientists claim that “four insertions in the COVID-19 virus in a short duration of time” is very unusual.
Even though their research was conducted in 2020, it has not been published yet and has been shelved because of the alleged backlash from within the community.
The study titled “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag” was withdrawn after the accusations of fueling conspiracy theories by fellow scientists. The work was read to imply that insertions were made by choice while conducting experiments in the Wuhan Laboratory, China.
The accusation perturbed the authors. Prof. B. Kundu, the lead member of the group, claims that the purpose of the study was “to simply place the findings in public so that researchers around the world can take clues and devise suitable remedial measures - vaccine, diagnostic, neutralizing antibodies, detection etc".
