1/n Here’s what still irks me in the EcoHealth/WIV narrative about RaTG13/4991. So in 2011 and 2012 Shi Zhengli goes on 2 expeditions to a bat cave near Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. There she finds CoV strains RsSHC014 and Rs3367 which share 85% and 96% with the first SARS-CoV
2/n This discovery is worthy of a Nature paper in 2013 and many subsequent accolades to its authors. Btw the first author of the 2013 Nature paper is Ge Xingyi, whose name features prominently on many other joint CoV papers. The team then proceeds to extract a live sample of
3/n Rs3367 which they then christen “WIV1” and later use as a backbone for several chimeric constructs. But for their 2015 joint chimera with Baric they used RsSHC014 as a backbone (85% similar to SARS).
4/n In parallel, in 2012 there is an outbreak of SARS-like pneumonia in a Mojiang mine in Yunnan: 6 miners get sick, 3 of them die. SZL is then invited to collect samples from the mine and her group visits it several times in 2012 and 2013. They discover one SARS-like CoV whose
5/n whose RdRp fragment is 88.4% close to SARS, but they consider 4991 “uninteresting” and never return to it until 2020, as per Peter Daszak? Even though there were 6 cases of potential human zoonotic jumps in that mine – the proverbial Holy Grail of virological surveillance?
6/n Moreover, it seems that around 2013-2015 Ge and Shi Zhengli were already working on pan-coronavirus therapies. For example, here is their joint 2015 paper on a peptide designed to block the activity of CoV 2’-O-Mtase (nsp10-16), which helps CoV2 evade the immune system.
7/7 In that paper they looked at SARS, MERS and 4 other CoVs. In retrospect, we now know that 4991’s nsp16 is about 95% identical to SARS – close enough to be interesting, but not 100% identical to warrant not looking into.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
