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the rice sequences - which is not hugely relevant since the source of the contamination could be from anywhere (with an unpublished HKU4 reverse genetics system...).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?
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the rice sequences - which is not hugely relevant since the source of the contamination could be from anywhere (with an unpublished HKU4 reverse genetics system...).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.