The hypothesis put forward by French Professor Luc Montagnier, one of the discoverers of HIV, raises controversy in the scientific community, that the emerging Corona virus is caused by a mistake made in a laboratory.
Montagnier - the Nobel Prize winner for medicine who is the subject of growing controversy in practical circles - saw the emerging Corona virus as a result of trying to produce a vaccine against HIV.
He confirmed in an interview with two sites concerned with medical affairs that the evidence for this is the presence of elements of the HIV virus in the genome of the new virus, as well as elements of malaria.
Montanier added that these characteristics of the emerging coronavirus cannot occur naturally. According to his opinion, the accident may have occurred in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
However, the epidemiologist Etienne Simon-Laurier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris said, "This does not make sense, as we find these small elements in other viruses of the same family, in other corona viruses in nature."
"They are parts of the genome that are really similar to many chains in the genetic traits of bacteria and viruses."
"If we took a word from a book and it looked like a word in another book, does that mean we copied it?" Asked the official in charge of the evolutionary genetic structure of viruses at the Pasteur Institute.
And the hypothesis that the virus is caused by genetic manipulations has been applied for a while, and it was excluded thanks to the analysis of the virus's genome provided by the Chinese.
Montagnier, who previously worked at the Pasteur Institute, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2008 for his diagnosis of the virus responsible for AIDS with his colleague, Professor François Barre-Senussi.