In its first official statement about the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the Indian government, in the person of Union minister Nitin Gadkari, has called the virus man-made. Gadkari is both the Minister for Road Transport & Highways of India and the Minister of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises He made the claim in an interview with NDTV on May 13, 2020.

Although  the larger number of scientists making public statements claim that SARSCoV-2 is natural, there are several important exceptions. Those exceptions warrant revisiting now that the Chinese government has retracted its original narrative of how the disease originated and is trying to  regulate investigation into that topic.

The first charges of a synthetic virus origin began with a non peer-reviewed preprint paper, “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp 120 and Gag,” written by a group of Indian scientists from IIT, Delhi.

The paper claimed that the virus might have been engineered using the AIDS virus, the HIV virus. Published on January 31 on preprint server bioRxiv, the paper was withdrawn on Feb 2, after vociferous  criticism from a number of scientists around the world.