Thanks for the critique Jonathan. This is a poorly designed phylogenetic study with too many inferences & not enough data, riding on a wave of conspiracy to drive a higher impact.
It's riddled with inaccuracies that suggest lack of understanding of the data they've analyzed e.g. "The S of RaTG13 is also capable of binding to human ACE2 although the virus does not infect humans (49)." This virus has not been isolated, so unknown whether can infect people.
or "..response to [SARS] deployed...strategies that were key to detecting ..adaptation to humans & cross-species transmission..(i) Sampling animals from markets, farms, & wild populations ..." Wrong: sampling of wild populations began later, based on our research, not response.
This is sloppy research. This info is widely published. It's important because the research to find relatives of SARS-CoV that bind to hACE2 took a few yrs. It will take similar efforts to find the same for SARS2 & until that work's done, this sort of study will be inadequate.
Oh, BTW, that will mean actually working in China, sampling bats, sequencing viruses, working collaboratively with labs like the...er...Wuhan Institute of Virology. Critical work to identify where SARS-CoV-2 came from & where the next one will originate. Canceled by @NIHDirector!
