Sky News Australia
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The coronavirus sweeping the globe bears a “signature” that’s never been seen in this virus class before and came “completely pre-adapted to humans,” according to Atossa Therapeutics CEO Dr Steven Quay.

Dr Quay's remarks came after he asked what it was about the coronavirus that makes him think it may have been the result of experimentation.

“There is a signature in the virus that’s not present in any other virus that SARS-COV-2 could have come from in terms of recombination,” he told Sky News Australia. 

“So it’s something that’s never been seen in this virus class before.”

Dr Quay said the other compelling aspect was that it was “pre-adapted to humans”.

“SARS one and MERS both practiced going into humans without sustaining human-to-human transfer,” he said.

“This is the first virus from nature that has strong human-to-human transfer right from the beginning.”

Dr Quay also said the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2019 took the “largest collection” of natural coronavirus offline.

“In September, in the middle of the night, they took a database of 16,000 coronaviruses that they found in nature offline and made it unavailable to the healthcare people of the world at the beginning of a pandemic,” he said. 

“They have a lot of coronavirus work in there, both natural and then we know they’re doing gain-of-function.

“They literally have the largest collection of natural coronaviruses in the world and they’re one of only three labs that do gain-of-function research on coronaviruses.

“There are signatures of lab gain-of-function work, so that’s why I lean towards that.”

Dr Quay summed up gain-of-function research as “juicing” up a virus in a laboratory to make it either “more transmissible, more infective or more lethal”. 

“All three of those are dangerous if someone gets infected, walks out of the laboratory asymptomatically and goes into the subway system, for example,” he said.