Posts Falsely Claim Natural Viruses Cannot Mutate Or Have Variants

"Only man-made viruses mutate. [Naturally occurring] viruses never mutate or have variants," reads a Korean-language Facebook post shared here on July 14, 2021.

The post attributes the claim to a "Dr Yan."

The highly contagious Delta variant of COVID-19 is expected to become the dominant strain of the virus over the coming months, the World Health Organization said on July 21, 2021. 

First detected in India, the variant has been recorded in 124 territories, as of July 21.

Other variants of the virus, named Alpha, Beta, Gamma by the WHO, have also been detected worldwide.

A similar claim was shared in Facebook posts here and here.

The claim is false. 

A spokesperson at the Korean Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) told AFP the claim was baseless.

"The claim is utterly false," the spokesperson said. "Mutation is not evidence of showing that a virus is man-made. It is natural for viruses to mutate."

Lee Jae-gap, a professor of Hallym University Kangnam Sacred Heart Hospital's Division of Infectious Diseases, also said there was no scientific evidence to support the claim.

"Viruses mutate in a natural environment", he said. "The mutation is a natural process of adaptation to evolutionary pressure."

"If the mutation is successful, [the virus] will continue to survive and circulate, if not, [it] would disappear. If viruses were 'man-made', I think that it would be designed to mutate less [as it's not always successful]."

'Natural viruses mutate'

Naturally occurring viruses often mutate, health experts said.

Vincent Maréchal, a professor of virology at Sorbonne University, said the idea that a virus could only mutate with human intervention was "stupid."

He told AFP in March 2021: "The mutations of a virus are natural phenomena linked to chance. Every time a living organism replicates itself, in particular viruses, it makes mistakes and these mistakes are mutations. This is the basis of the theories of Darwin."

New variants of a virus can emerge and disappear but sometimes they persist, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

"All viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, change over time. Most changes have little to no impact on the virus' properties," the World Health Organization (WHO) said on a website dedicated to tracking SARS-CoV-2 variants. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by BOOM staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)