Disinfo: The SARS-CoV-2 virus demonstrates visible signs of human manipulation

One of many conspiracy theories about the origin of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. There is no evidence recognised by the scientific community that suggests the coronavirus (2019-nCoV) could have been man-made. Professor Luc Montagnier, winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, quotes the study of Jean-Claude Perez, a 72 years old mathematician, which so far doesn't meet up the scientific standards to be published by a referenced Journal. The work of Jean-Claude Perez has been published in a Journal that lacks peer-review and international audience among specialists. The study shows that very small sequences of the genome of SARS-2 are similar to some strains of HIV, but the coincidences are not significant given the small size of the sequences. In other words, these sequences are not insertions but are rather common sequences found in numerous other organisms such as bacteria and parasites. Therefore, the existence of these sequences in SARS-CoV-2 does not provide evidence of a link to HIV, nor that scientists purposely inserted HIV sequences into the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Besides that, the "cherry-picking" approach (keeping only the results that support the theory and dismissing results that don't) of this study also questions its value. More generally professor Luc Montagnier defended controverted theories during the last decade and scientists repeatedly questioned his credibility. In 2012, 40 Nobel Prize winners signed a petition against Professor Montagnier, claiming that he "accumulates scientific and medical sham". In 2017, more than a hundred members of the Academy of Sciences signed another petition to denounce what he deemed as "dangerous". Alexandre Moatti, historian of sciences, reminds that many scientists who revived the Nobel prize later drifted into ideology or fake-science. Conspiracy theories often put forwards authority argument to be convincing and difficult to refute. However, the fact that a Nobel Prize laureate supports a theory doesn't make it true. On April 21, the World Health Organisation spokeswoman Fadela Chaib stated that “All available evidence suggests the virus has an animal origin and is not manipulated or constructed in a lab or somewhere else.”