It depends on personal interpretations of "deliberately created". To wit, virology labs will deliberately breed up more virulent strains of viruses in order to study their effects.
It depends on personal interpretations of "deliberately created". To wit, virology labs will deliberately breed up more virulent strains of viruses in order to study their effects.
I don't know what's Montagnier's position beyond that paragraph on Wikipedia, but a virus undergoing gain of function research could be I suppose described as "deliberately created" (obviously not from scratch and not deliberately released).
The most likely theory of artificial origin is that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately created as a chimera of two natural sarbecoviruses with a human-designed furin cleavage site between them. The WIV proposed to undertake this research in collaboration with Ralph Baric in the DEFUSE proposal, as a step towards his goal of a pan-coronavirus vaccine. DARPA declined to fund the proposal, in part due to safety concerns. Zhengli Shi had the technical knowledge to perform the work alone at the WIV, although no specific evidence has yet emerged that she did so.
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
That said, Montagnier appears to have speculated that SARS-CoV-2 contains genetic information from HIV. That seems almost surely false, since the sequences he cited occur frequently in many organisms.
https://apnews.com/article/conspiracy-theories-iran-only-on-...