I have not heard from this guy before (I work in microbial genomics, he seems to be in the field of health economics from a quick search), so I can't comment on that.
Occam's razor says no. The coronavirus spike protein is responsible for receptor binding and entry into the cell. Different strains with different hosts bind to different receptors, so they have differences in their spike protein sequences. Mutations in the spike protein are expected in the evolution of coronavirus.