DISINFO: The US owns the coronavirus and its cure

Recurring pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives about the US and about the coronavirus. The claim that the United States has patented and owns the coronavirus goes back to viral incorrect claims that the virus, along with its vaccine is owned by the Pirbright Institute (a research institute in the UK), was funded by the American Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The institute works to prevent viral diseases of livestock. The Pirbright Institute clarified that they don’t work with human coronaviruses and that a patent that they hold is unrelated to the current coronavirus linked to Wuhan. The patent that the story links to - No. 10,130,701 - is for a mutated form of avian infectious bronchitis virus (IBV), a different coronavirus that infects poultry, but not people. That patent was filed by the Pirbright Institute, but not funded by the Gates Foundation, and the mutations were created to weaken the virus so that it could be used as a vaccine to protect chickens from IBV. Matthew Frieman, a coronavirus researcher at the University of Maryland, told FactCheck.org that the patent has nothing to do with the new 2019-nCoV virus. The American Centre for Disease Control and Prevention explains that the name of new coronavirus comes from the crown, or corona-like appearance of infective viruses when seen under a microscope. The CDC told the Associated Press in 2003 that the agency was claiming ownership of a patent related to a virus that causes SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome, a disease that spread to dozens of countries in 2003, in result of which more than 8,000 people got ill and 774 people died), in order to ensure access and to prevent others from controlling the technology.