According to Dr Monali Rahalkar and Dr Rahul Bahulikar, it was the suffering of people all over the world that prompted them to dig deep into the origins of the novel coronavirus.
It was during this search, said the scientists, that they came across documents related to an abandoned copper mine in Mojiang in south China. In 2012, six miners were employed to clean the mineshaft, which was full of bat droppings (guano or bat faeces), according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
They cited certain structural features in Sars-2 to say that it could be a lab-engineered virus. They also pointed out that no natural host of the Sars-2 or an intermediate host through which it jumped on to the humans had been traced.
The two researchers asserted: “The genetic structure of SARS-CoV-2 does not rule out a laboratory origin” and hit out at the February 19-The Lancet statement authors saying, “an artificial origin of SARS-CoV-2 is not a baseless conspiracy theory that is to be condemned”.
