On 31 January 2020, nine Indian researchers published a paper on bioRxiv, an open access online repository, after their request to carry their research paper was rejected by seven prominent medical journals.
These nine researchers had found, to put it in layman’s language, that the Covid-19 virus was “manipulated” and “laboratory made”.
The researchers, who are from IIT Delhi and Acharya Narendra Dev College, University of Delhi, in their report titled “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag” wrote that they found at least “four insertions” in the spike glyco-proteins which are found in the crown like structure of the coronavirus. They stated that these insertions are “not” naturally found in any coronaviruses, while suggesting that the present Covid-19 virus was a “tailor made” virus.
However, they had to withdraw their paper from bioRxiv on 2 February after what they attribute to the massive criticism that they faced from many big scientists who described them as “rumour mongering scientists” and “attention seeking scientists” who had arrived at their conclusion without any scientific basis.
In fact, even Dr Anthony Fauci, member of the US Covid-19 task force and Director of the US’ National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), criticized the research paper.
This came to light after the contents of Fauci’s official email were made public by US-based journalists who had sought access to them through the Freedom of Information ACT (FOIA) (similar to RTI Act in India).
The Sunday Guardian also reached out to Professor Biswajit Kundu from IIT Delhi who is also a corresponding author. Professor Kundu said that he and his team of researchers stand by their research work.
“We still stand by what we had published. We are certain about our findings. We still stand by the fact that there have been four unusual inserts into the spike protein of the Covid-19 virus which does not occur naturally. We believe it is a laboratory made virus. We also know that the truth will come out sooner than later,” he told The Sunday Guardian.
The other eight people who were a part of this 14-page paper apart from Kundu are: Prashant Pradhan, Ashutosh Kumar Pandey, Akhilesh Mishra, Parul Gupta, Praveen Kumar Tripathi, Manoj Balakrishnan Menon, James Gomes and Perumal Vivekanandan.
