Re:Dr. Fauci Backed Controversial Wuhan Lab for Risky Corona...
by jml7c5 on Wednesday May 06, 2020 @06:32AM
(#23089479)
I'd like to hear more about the info in your second paragraph. Is there any reading material (articles, papers, etc) you suggest? It sounds quite interesting, and I had not heard about the spike affinity wrt ferrets.
The sequence of the virus strongly resembles RaTG13-CoV, a bat coronavirus discovered by WIV. The sequence is almost identical, except for the spike protein. The spike protein strongly resembles a Pangolin CoV also discovered by the WIV. Shi Zhengli and another researcher from WIV are authors on a paper from 2015 where they transplanted the spike protein from one Coronavirus onto the remaining parts of SARS-CoV. They've also done "serial passage" experiments, where they infect either cell cultures or live animals, so that a virus becomes more adapted to that host. One of the animals that they used for these experiments were ferrets, for which SARS-CoV-2's spike shows extremely high affinity.
Now, it's possible that two viruses recombined naturally, but then why did the virus first show up in Wuhan? Wuhan is a thousand miles from the bat caves where they found these viruses in Yunnan. As far as we know, they did not exist in Wuhan, except in the WIV's freezer.