What was claimed
SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated, purified, sequenced, characterised or proven to exist.
Our verdict
The SARS-CoV-2 virus does exist and has been sequenced over a million times in the UK alone.
SARS-CoV-2 does exist
11 November 2021
A post on social media claims that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) has “never been: isolated, purified, sequenced, characterised” or “proven to exist”.
As we have written before, SARS-CoV-2 has been isolated many times. Dr. Stephen Griffin, a virologist and Associate Professor at Leeds Institute of Medical Research previously told Full Fact: “SARS-CoV2 has been sampled millions of times over from infected people, including those originally found to be infected in China”.
The genetic information of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has also been extensively sequenced in the UK, and around the world. This has allowed scientists to understand more about the virus’ transmission and how variants have evolved. SARS-CoV-2 has also been well characterised in the literature.
The existence of SARS-CoV-2 is well documented and a pandemic was declared by the World Health Organisation in March 2020.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because SARS-CoV-2 does exist and has been sequenced over a million times in the UK alone.