The WIV engineered chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses
2 events · 1 assessment
Assessed Verified
verdict confidence 0.95
The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) did construct chimeric SARS-like coronaviruses, and this is a documented matter of published scientific record rather than a point of genuine dispute. In peer-reviewed work published in 2017 (Hu et al., PLoS Pathogens), WIV researchers used a reverse-genetics system to build infectious clones combining the backbone of the bat coronavirus WIV1 with spike genes drawn from several other bat SARS-related coronaviruses, successfully rescuing viable chimeric viruses. Earlier collaborative work (Menachery et al., 2015) had likewise generated a chimera using the spike of a WIV-derived bat coronavirus (SHC014) on a SARS-CoV backbone. Informed observers across the origins debate accept that this chimeric-virus research took place; what remains contested is a separate question — whether any such work bears on the origin of SARS-CoV-2 — and that dispute lives on other claims, not this one. On its own terms, this claim is well established.
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