Social media posts claiming that U.S. drugmaker Moderna made the virus that started the COVID-19 pandemic have been repeatedly debunked as false. But that hasn’t stopped them from popping up everywhere on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform.
An example: “Research Confirms Novel Coronavirus Was Manufactured By An American Company” was the No. 1 trending topic on Weibo on March 24, with 1.2 billion – that’s with a ‘b’ – views in a single day. On March 31, it still attracted some 5.5 million views.
The trend took off after the Chinese state media outlets Global Times and China Daily republished an article by Tao Wen, a blogger on China’s dominant messaging app, WeChat.
The article began with the false claim that 36 U.S. biolabs in Ukraine “manufacture biological weapons.” That Kremlin-generated conspiracy theory has been debunked and others. The article also falsely claimed those biolabs were using bats to study coronaviruses.
Then, this (bogus) bombshell:
“British media revealed the shocking news that the novel coronavirus was manufactured by the United States,” the article claims.
The "British media" that the article refers to is the Daily Mail newspaper. However, the actual source of the claim that the novel coronavirus was manufactured by the United States is The Exposé, a British website that has published inaccurate and baseless anti-vaccine health information debunked by multiple fact-checking platforms.
The false claim began circulating on March 14, when The Exposé an article, “Whilst you were distracted by the Battle for Ukraine, Documents were published confirming Moderna created the Covid-19 Virus.”
That article did cite , which cited published in the research journal Frontiers in Virology. The study said Moderna had patented “a tiny chunk of DNA” matching the genetic sequence in a part of the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 “three years before the pandemic began.”
A is a specific feature of a coronavirus through which the virus penetrates host cells and causes disease. Other viruses also have spike proteins.
The was reviewed by an expert on the publication’s review panel. The Daily Mail did acknowledge the possibility the genetic sequence match was a coincidence rather than “smoking gun” proof the virus came from a lab – a hypothesis that persists despite pointing to an origin in animals.
Professor Lawrence Young, a virologist at the U.K.’s Warwick University, told the Daily Mail the findings were interesting, but “not significant enough to suggest lab manipulation.”
“We're talking about a very, very, very small piece made up of 19 nucleotides (the basic structural unit of nucleic acids such as DNA),” he told the newspaper. “So it doesn't mean very much to be frank, if you do these types of searches you can always find matches.”
The Exposé was more emphatic, however, claiming the discovery had “proven beyond a reasonable doubt … that Moderna made Covid-19.”
While Moderna declined to comment on that claim, other fact checkers addressed it.
the lead scientist of the study, Dr. Bala Ambati, an ophthalmologist and research professor at the University of Oregon.
PolitiFact quoted Ambati as saying he could not endorse the “sweeping” and “false” conclusions reached by The Exposé.
“We understood from the beginning that this match could be random chance and stated this in the article very prominently," he said. But when asked if the article offered definitive proof that "Moderna created the COVID-19 virus,” Ambati said the paper’s goal was to invite further study.
“We are not casting aspersions on any person, company, or country, but rather raising the hypothesis that recombination in a human cell line with a lab leak could be the origin of SARS-CoV-2,” Agence France-Presse (AFP) .
Ambati maintained that both a lab leak and natural origin theory for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 remain plausible.
Still, PolitiFact cited fact checkers at the review site Health Feedback who found that the 19-nucleotide long segment in question is neither unique or "specific to manmade sequences."
"It [the sequence] can be found in other living things, showing that the sequence occurs naturally. The presence of a short, identical gene sequence isn’t evidence that the virus was engineered," .
Dr. Stanley Perlman, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa, whose lab studies coronavirus infections, told PolitiFact the claim made by The Exposé is not supported "by any believable data."
Craig Wilen, a professor of immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, was also dismissive of the study published in Frontiers in Virology.