4 ms·
Just to be clear, this doesn't imply that moderna released the viruses. Patents are publically visible, after all. It suggests that someone was told to insert
by dnautics 5y ago
Just to be clear, this doesn't imply that moderna released the viruses. Patents are publically visible, after all. It suggests that someone was told to insert a furin cleavage site, then went and "stack overflow copy-pasted" the moderna furin cleavage site, and this became the coronavirus. If we believe that this is what happened, it possible that whoever did this also looked up and copy pasted other furin cleavage sites, and thus the purely random odds of the eye-popping "moderna" aspect of the coincidence would considerably less (let's say, 1 in 100 or less, depending on how much work you think the hypothetical postdoc bothered to do). Do note that the moderna furin cleavage site itself is probably subjected to industrial selection pressures that enhance its delivery, which might also correlate to infectivity, so a non-uniform distribution of infectivity among stack-overflow-ed furin cleavage sites, that favors the infectivity of something like the moderna sequence, should be considered.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hodwik3 5y agoGiven that this line is from a cell culture, wouldn’t the simpler explanation be that the virus has this sequence because it was replicated in that specific Moderna culture lineage? This would be a particularly useful discovery, because it would dramatically limit the candidates for who did the gain of function research to organizations licensed this Moderna lineage.