Nature in March 2020 that the genomic sequences point to a natural origin. Neither his initial email or his subsequent paper should be taken as the last word.Even now, the jury is out on the virus’s origin and whether its genome holds an answer.
I asked virologist David Sanders of Purdue University about suggestions of artificial manipulation that showed up in an article by researcher Yuri Deigin and was later presented by science writer Nicholas Wade.
One main argument is that there’s a distinguishing feature that separates Sars-CoV-2 from its closest cousins, a ‘furin cleavage site’, which allows the virus to hijack a protein in our cells, called furin, to activate itself.