Did American and Chinese research scientists collaborate to create the COVID-19 virus that somehow escaped a lab and unleashed a global pandemic, the likes of which the world hadn’t seen since the 1918 Spanish flu?

The questions surrounding the origin of the novel coronavirus increasingly appear to point to not only a lab leak but to a virus of an unnatural creation. According to a World Health Organization collaborator’s review of a 2018 application for a research grant sent to the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency by the American nonprofit research outfit EcoHealth Alliance, American and Chinese scientists were involved in gain-of-function research with coronaviruses.

The application in question explains the research: “We will compile sequence/RNAseq data from a panel of closely related strains and compare full length genomes, scanning for unique SNPs representing sequencing errors. Consensus candidate genomes will be synthesised commercially using established techniques and genome-length RNA and electroporation to recover recombinant viruses.” In other words, gain-of-function research.

The grant was not approved, but that doesn’t mean the research didn’t occur or wasn’t ongoing. It’s also true that the likelihood that gain-of-function research was happening at the Wuhan lab doesn’t preclude the possibility of a natural origin explanation for COVID-19. So why has the theory of a lab leak gained prominence? Because even though COVID appears natural, there’s a significant missing step or missing link.

The research scientists “would then synthesise the viral genome from the computer sequence, thus creating a virus genome that did not exist in nature but looks natural as it is the average of natural viruses,” the WHO reviewer explains. “Then they put that RNA in a cell and recover the virus from it. This creates a virus that has never existed in nature, with a new ‘backbone’ that didn’t exist in nature but is very, very similar as it’s the average of natural backbones.”

“If Sars-CoV-2 comes from an artificial consensus sequence composed of genomes with more than 95 per cent similarity to each other,” the WHO individual added, “I would predict that we will never find a really good match in nature and just a bunch of close matches across parts of the sequence, which so far is what we are seeing.”

For the natural origin theory to work, scientists would expect to find a near ancestor virus with at least a 99.98% genome match, but thus far the closest virus genome found is only a 96.8% match. Of course, the absence of evidence is not evidence. Yet there appears to be a growing preponderance of circumstantial evidence supporting not only a lab leak but also an unnatural origin for COVID-19.