Question: What do you think about people saying that the global pandemic was created in a lab?

Sabrina Slater answered on 11 Jun 2020:

Hey Lorenzo,
Good question! It’s always good to think about the things we read on the internet and see on the news these days. Scientists have thought about this too, and found some key bits of information that make this theory very unlikely.

1) People in rural parts of the world already have antibodies to viruses that animals like bats carry, meaning their bodies have already been exposed to viruses that are very similar to COVID-19, and have been for a long long time! It’s just in the pandemic, the virus has mutated to be more infectious.
2) Scientists have looked into the genetic information that COVID-19 carries and agree that these genes look very similar to many other natural viruses that we have seen before. There is nothing “new” or “manmade” about them.
3) Scientists literally can’t engineer COVID-19 – we don’t have the understanding or the technology to know how to make or change a virus in such a way that would make it infectious in the way that COVID-19 is. In fact, we’re still trying to understand exactly why COVID-19 is so infectious so that we can develop treatments and vaccines!

There will always be conspiracy theories and crazy people making crazy claims, but luckily there will also always be experts, so good job for asking the right question to the right group of people 😀