COVID-19 pandemic
A number of conspiracy theories have been promoted about the origin and purported motive behind the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its spread. Some claimed that the virus was engineered, that it escaped or was stolen from a research laboratory, that it may have been a Chinese or United States bioweapon, a Jewish plot including to force mass vaccinations or sterilizations, spread as part of a Muslim conspiracy, a population control scheme, or related to 5G mobile phone networks.
Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne has repeated blamed the outbreak on the Rockefellers, claiming the pandemic was a planned event. His accusations are based on the Rockefeller Foundation document: Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development. Pastor Howard-Brown has highlighted the subsection of the document entitled "Lockstep" which details a hypothetical global pandemic with some vague similarities to the COVID-19 outbreak. Howard-Brown's thesis is that the Rockefellars and Bill Gates manufactured an event with the eventual goal of mass vaccinations in order to reduce the human population.
Howard Brown published a book titled The Phantom Virus in 2020 spelling out his interpretation of events of the pandemic. His views have been echoed by other prominent Christian leaders such as John Hagee, who called the event "A dress rehearsal for the New World Order".
In 2015, Nature Medicine published a study by an international group of researchers (including Shi Zhengli who in 2019 identified SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan) on creating a chimeric virus pathogenic to humans. This publication later in 2019 sparked speculations that SARS-CoV-2 is a variant of such human-engineered virus. In 2020 Nature Medicine published an article arguing against the conspiracy theory that the virus was created artificially. The high-affinity binding of its peplomers to human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) was shown to be "most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise". In case of genetic manipulation, one of the several reverse-genetic systems for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used, while the genetic data irrefutably showed that the virus is not derived from a previously used virus template. The overall molecular structure of the virus was found to be distinct from the known coronaviruses and most closely resembles that of viruses of bats and pangolins that were little studied and never known to harm humans.
Source: www.wikipedia.com
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