Copying /u/BurrShotFirst1804's main response here for easier reference:

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This study is crap.

My comment from another thread. This paper isn't peer reviewed or published. It's just an online journal.

I've worked pretty closely with gag in my PhD thesis. Gag is the conglomerate protein that gets cut by the protease to generate the hiv capsid, matrix, and carrier proteins. Gp120 is the receptor protein.

This is a really fucking dumb study and these scientists should be ashamed. Those amino acids are so short. They just went and looked for a virus to match. You can go and blast the amino acids yourself. Just copy and paste from the journal entry into NCBIs BLASTp. I did it and there's hundreds of matches to those sequences. HIV didn't even come up in the first 100. The 4th residue is missing like 6 amino acids. There are conserved regions in viruses. Their "gp120" match compares 6 amino acids out of 850 in the whole protein for example.

They found 4 sections that were in the new virus but not SARS. They then took these differences and ran them against all known viral proteins. They only looked at proteins with 100% matches, but if you look at the table they didn't match 100% for alignment. So like one is ABCEFG and they match it to an HIV protein that is ABCXYZEFG and they are calling those total matches. There's also tons of viruses that match these tiny sequences, they just noticed all 4 have HIV matches so they ignore the other matches and only looked at HIV.

Go blast it yourself if you want.

A significant part of my postdoc training involved carefully determining what BLAST hits are likely to be true or not. However, I saw some scientists (often bored, or inexperienced) who would set their E-value threshold to 10 (IE, expect 9 false positives for every true positive) and just sort of mine the results until they had some other data that seemed "significant" and published. A lot of science is done this way :(

I’m think they might be aiming at HIV because China has also been in the news for genetically modifying two babies to prevent HIV. Disinformation designed to send people down a hole, linking stuff together to make it seem more plausible.

Difficult to properly peer review when things are moving so quickly.

Plenty of things are being peer reviewed properly with this outbreak. But you can't take preprints in biology as any more holy writ than you can the occasional post on arXiv where someone claims to have come up with a complete unified model for physics, or solved a previously intractable problem.

True about the complete theory. I would suggest that proper review takes time though. Many eyes.