A medical worker takes a swab sample from the photographer to be tested for the COVID-19 coronavirus in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province on March 30, 2020. (AFP photo)
A Pakistani scientist specializing in organic chemistry has said that the highly contagious novel coronavirus did not necessarily emerge naturally through mutation but rather may have been produced in a laboratory in the United States as a bioweapon.
Professor Dr. Atta-ur-Rahman, who has a Ph.D and Sc.D. in organic chemistry from King’s College, Cambridge, made the remarks in an interview on Sunday when asked about the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed about 35,000 people and infected more than 737,000 across the world.
When asked whether the novel coronavirus is a bio-weapon, Dr. Rahman said, "It is possible that an existing virus has been syntactically modified and developed into a bio-weapon."
"There is some evidence that the United States was working on a bio-weapon in a laboratory. The laboratory was closed following a leakage. It was a military laboratory," added Rahman, who is also the chairman of Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s National Task Force on Science and Technology.
"There is also evidence that it did not start from Wuhan, China, but that it was developed in certain laboratories in the West, including a lab in the UK and USA. These labs were involved in the bio-weapon program," he revealed.
Quoting Pakistan’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Abdullah Hussain Haroon, the scientist said all this was done in order to beat China, and this is a vicious plot.
He added this cannot be covered up for long and the people behind it would be exposed.
Earlier this month, a former American counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer of the CIA has said that the coronavirus "was produced in a laboratory, possibly as a biological warfare agent."
"Several reports suggest that there are components of the virus that are related to HIV that could not have occurred naturally. If it is correct that the virus had either been developed or even produced to be weaponized it would further suggest that its escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology Lab and into the animal and human population could have been accidental. Technicians who work in such environments are aware that ‘leaks’ from laboratories occur frequently," Philip Giraldi wrote in an article published by the Strategic Culture Foundation on March 5.
Since the outbreak of the epidemic, the origin of the novel coronavirus has been widely discussed online, with the US media insisting that the disease started from a market a seafood market in central China’s Wuhan City, in December last year.
But now even American health experts acknowledge that he novel coronavirus did not originate from seafood market.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry has not ruled out the possibility that the United States was to blame for the spread of the coronavirus in China.
The ministry has even suggested that the US military might have brought the coronavirus to the Chinese city of Wuhan in October last year when 300 US troops participated to join international war games held there.
SOURCE: PRESS TV
LINK: https://www.ansarpress.com/english/15187
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