4 ms·

The argument "they would have used a published backbone and reverse genetics system" is wishful thinking. You might interested in this paper: https://www.biorx

The argument "they would have used a published backbone and reverse genetics system" is wishful thinking. You might interested in this paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 "Discovery of a novel merbecovirus DNA clone contaminating agricultural rice sequencing datasets from Wuhan, China" MERS is really nasty, this is clearly evidence of engineering, and guess what the system is unpublished. Personally I suspect this paper (which came out a while ago but got "boosted" recently) could be the reason for DOE "confidence update". Media have not reported on this and "the usual" zoonosis advocates have been remarkably silent about it.

lamontcg 4y ago
HKU4 contamination in agricultural samples in the Country that HKU4 was discovered in does not pose a particularly controversial question as to how it got there. While it is in the same group of beta coronaviruses that MERS is in, the HKU4 virus was first found in Kowloon and the "HK" stands for "Hong Kong" (although it would be a mistake to assume that says much more than where it was found and not what its range is throughout China) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111821/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111821/ And coronaviruses undergo recombination (XBB.1.5 is a recombinant which is all over the news) and that produces "Chimeric" viruses in nature. Finding evidence of "gene splicing" in samples and determining it must be humans ignores the fact that nature does it better than we do, and really points at how politically biased that article is. They want you to believe that WIV imported MERS-like viruses from Saudi Arabia and were fucking around with them in the lab, and not that those viruses are found all over China naturally and nature fucks around them constantly in much higher volume than we can.
- xyzzy123 4y ago
  Did you notice the bit where it's a cDNA clone of an RNA virus and do you understand the implications of that? This is an engineering product. As for politics, sure there is a lot of that going around but you can verify this finding yourself with freely available software using the published sequences.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    That preprint is now starting to get slaughtered in the Disqus comment section associated with it.
    - xyzzy123 4y ago
      I don't think much of the "takedown" so far. Interested to discuss specifics if I'm not getting something. Cadhla (who works for EcoHealth alliance BTW) points out that it was Wuhan University who registered the rice sequence bioproject PRJNA601977 - which is not hugely relevant since the source of the contamination could be from anywhere (that happened to have a HKU4 reverse genetics system...). Andreas points to incomplete sequence coverage (not unusual in a contamination scenario) and claims it might be "not dangerous work" because the sequence gap leaves open the possibility that the missing bit was non-functional. True but weak. It's 33 NTs of highly conserved sequence, what does he really think was in that gap? I know what Fat Tony would say. Flo's comments seem to be claiming that https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 is plagiarizing https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr353109 https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr353109 (the team's earlier paper which included a similar finding). Her claim that a reverse genetics systems for HKU4-like COVs was previously disclosed seems weird since AFAIK it was this team that had previously disclosed it. It's possible I am not understanding what she is saying as it makes no sense to me.

lamontcg 4y ago

HKU4 contamination in agricultural samples in the Country that HKU4 was discovered in does not pose a particularly controversial question as to how it got there. While it is in the same group of beta coronaviruses that MERS is in, the HKU4 virus was first found in Kowloon and the "HK" stands for "Hong Kong" (although it would be a mistake to assume that says much more than where it was found and not what its range is throughout China) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111821/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7111821/ And coronaviruses undergo recombination (XBB.1.5 is a recombinant which is all over the news) and that produces "Chimeric" viruses in nature. Finding evidence of "gene splicing" in samples and determining it must be humans ignores the fact that nature does it better than we do, and really points at how politically biased that article is. They want you to believe that WIV imported MERS-like viruses from Saudi Arabia and were fucking around with them in the lab, and not that those viruses are found all over China naturally and nature fucks around them constantly in much higher volume than we can.

xyzzy123 4y ago
Did you notice the bit where it's a cDNA clone of an RNA virus and do you understand the implications of that? This is an engineering product. As for politics, sure there is a lot of that going around but you can verify this finding yourself with freely available software using the published sequences.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  That preprint is now starting to get slaughtered in the Disqus comment section associated with it.
  - xyzzy123 4y ago
    I don't think much of the "takedown" so far. Interested to discuss specifics if I'm not getting something. Cadhla (who works for EcoHealth alliance BTW) points out that it was Wuhan University who registered the rice sequence bioproject PRJNA601977 - which is not hugely relevant since the source of the contamination could be from anywhere (that happened to have a HKU4 reverse genetics system...). Andreas points to incomplete sequence coverage (not unusual in a contamination scenario) and claims it might be "not dangerous work" because the sequence gap leaves open the possibility that the missing bit was non-functional. True but weak. It's 33 NTs of highly conserved sequence, what does he really think was in that gap? I know what Fat Tony would say. Flo's comments seem to be claiming that https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 is plagiarizing https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr353109 https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr353109 (the team's earlier paper which included a similar finding). Her claim that a reverse genetics systems for HKU4-like COVs was previously disclosed seems weird since AFAIK it was this team that had previously disclosed it. It's possible I am not understanding what she is saying as it makes no sense to me.