Coronavirus has been in bats ready to strike humans for 10 YEARS, scientists believe

The paper was hastily withdrawn following a backlash from other scientists, but the damage had been done.

Dr Bedford, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, said the study was “wrong on a number of levels”.

“The first reference paper released on bioarchive a couple of weeks ago that was very shoddily done, where they had aligned SARS and found these short regions that differed between them and found a link to HIV,” he said.

“Those sequences were not unique. They are not inserts, they are just natural.

“Those chunks of RNA, you see they blast through the tree of life. Neither side of that paper was true.”