evidence: Numerous articles published in April 2020 report that Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier claimed that "SARS-CoV-2 is a manipulated virus that was accidentally released from a laboratory in Wuhan, China" and that "Indian researchers have already tried to publish the results of the analyses that showed that this coronavirus genome contained sequences of another virus […] the HIV virus (AIDS virus)." The claim that SARS-CoV-2 contains "HIV insertions" began circulating in January 2020, and was propagated by outlets such as Zero Hedge and Infowars. Health Feedback covered this claim in early February 2020, and found it to be inaccurate. [...] This has also been independently confirmed in another published analysis[5]. In other words, these sequences are not insertions, but are rather common sequences found in numerous other organisms such as bacteria and parasites. Therefore, the existence of these sequences in SARS-CoV-2 does not provide evidence of a link to HIV, nor that scientists purposely inserted HIV sequences into the SARS-CoV-2 genome. [...] The author of this article by European Scientist also compared the genome sequences of SARS-CoV-2 and HIV using the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST), developed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and found "no significant similarity", explaining that "In plain English, SARS-CoV-2 is not made of the bat coronavirus and small bits of the HIV virus." Readers who wish to verify the level of sequence identity between the two viruses for themselves are welcome to follow the steps listed in the article.