Stop swallowing virus conspiracy theories

LETTER | By all accounts, coronavirus-related rumours and conspiracy theories that appear on the Internet and social media have reached a wide audience around the world. 

Such contemporary speculation about the virus outbreak is no doubt harmful as it curbs global efforts to combat the virus.

As a scientist, I fully support the move by a team of 27 prominent scientists from outside China (including Prof Dr Lam Sai Kit from the University of Malaya) who published a statement in the reputable medical journal The Lancet to “strongly condemn” the conspiracy theories, which “create fear, rumours and prejudice that jeopardise global collaboration in the fight against this virus”.

Given the harmful effect of the conspiracies, the public must be aware that these are baseless and nonsensical arguments. Below are two examples of a speculative research paper, which went viral on the Internet, and were used by some netizens for supporting the conspiracy theories.

1. “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120”: On Jan 31, this paper was uploaded to the website bioRxiv.

The study claims that “the finding of four unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature”.

This work by scientists at the Indian Institute of technology has received much unfavourable feedback from the scientific community. The public and those who believe in conspiracy theories, however, quickly picked this information up and spread them on Twitter and WhatsApp: 

“Oh my God. Indian scientists have just found HIV (AIDS) virus-like insertions in the 2019-nCov virus that are not found…”, “….have been genetically engineered”, “….China's biological weapons lab is in Wuhan”, etc.

Further scrutiny of the conserved protein regions has revealed the so-called four identified insertions are the “alignment artefact” when scientist compared two strings of amino acid. They are not genuine “insertions of HIV genes”. 

Coupled with many other scientific method-related errors, including “cherry-picking of the results”, this “uncanny” research paper is unreliable and lacks scientific merits. 

The analysis showed that the short proteins found to be similar to HIV are simply the outcomes of the natural evolution of the Covid-19 virus.

2. On Feb 15, another research paper was uploaded onto the Research Gate (a commercial social networking site for scientists to share papers) by two Chinese scientists. 

They examined the histories of the laboratories researching bat coronavirus in Wuhan and proposed that “the coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory”. 

They claim that “it’s plausible that the virus leaked and infected the initial patients in this epidemic”. 

This paper gives conspiracy supporters fuel to stress that “the virus is related to the experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology”, and stir fry these points on social media.

While the truth behind this (whether the bats from the lab are the origins) remains unclear, using the distance 280m between the Huanan seafood market and the Wuhan bio lab to support the notion that coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan is a scientifically unsound, shaky argument.

The public should understand that unless the conspiracists provide concrete and scientific “troubling evidence” of a conspiracy theory, the best thing to do when receiving such dubious claims is to apply critical thinking.

We should be more observant of what we see and read and, most importantly, to prevent these messages from clouding our minds.

Dr Song Beng Kah is from the School of Science, Monash University Malaysia.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.