Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Agency Now Says

Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag... by lamontcg on Sunday February 26, 2023 @05:39PM (#34950405)

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/

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.

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Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag... by xyzzy123 on Sunday February 26, 2023 @06:49PM (#34951073)

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.

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Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag... by lamontcg on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @07:05PM (#34976796)

That preprint is now starting to get slaughtered in the Disqus comment section associated with it.

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Re:Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, U.S. Ag... by xyzzy123 on Thursday March 02, 2023 @05:18PM (#35002873)

I don't think much of the "takedown" so far.

Cadhla (who works for EcoHealth alliance BTW) points out that it was HZAU who registered the rice sequences - which is not hugely relevant since the source of the contamination could be from anywhere (with an unpublished HKU4 reverse genetics system...).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 it would be?

Flo's comments are bizarre and seem to be claiming that https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.02.12.528210v2 is plagiarizing https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr353109 (the team's earlier paper which included the same finding). The claim that a reverse genetics systems for HKU4-like COVs was previously "published" is particularly weird since it was this team that had previously disclosed it.

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