Thread by @Ayjchan

Starting to wonder how many virus samples are sitting in freezers waiting to be sequenced.

The newest pangolin CoV in GISAID (EPI_ISL_610156) was collected in Yunnan in 2017. Someone implied that this was proof of the 2019 Guangdong pangolin CoV, but it's quite different...

The Yunnan pangolin CoV sequence is full of gaps, missing front half of the Spike, no RBD to even compare with the SARS2-like RBD in the Guangdong pangolin CoV.

Not sure why anyone would think this Yunnan pangolin CoV is useful to verifying the history of the GD pangolin CoV.

Meanwhile, the Guangdong pangolin CoV authors who haven't provided any of the novel raw data mentioned in their May 2020 @PLOSPathogens paper just released more short sequence fragments for another paper?
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/popset?DbFrom=…

And the other group of authors @nature who published the same Guangdong pangolin CoV sequence built primarily with the same dataset as the @PLoSPathogens group - still don't know when the correction will be made despite 101K article accesses...
nature.com/articles/s4158…

A group that directly handled the 2019 Guangdong pangolins affirmed that none of the 20 caregivers who handled the sick pangolin reported being infected.

Their table 2 shows 10 studies demonstrating SARS-CoV-2 likely did not originate from pangolin CoVs. conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.11…

Would it be irrational to request that before any more bat x pangolin speculation gets published in peer-reviewed journals, an independent bioinformatics team is convened to check all of the data and sample histories of the Guangdong pangolin CoV?

You don't have to trust @shingheizhan and I.
biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

The data we analyzed is public. Literally anyone can check it and verify that what we found about the GD pangolin with the SARS2-like Spike RBD is true.

Starting to get a bit worried about the processes by which journals verify the accuracy of their papers. If the authors can’t produce the data for months and months after publication, is the strategy to keep asking for the next 5 years?

Got the data you said you had yet?

To the experts convened by the @WHO checking frozen meat for the origins of covid-19. #PopsicleOrigins

Does the team know that the WIV found 8 other SARS viruses between 2012-2015 in a mine where people died from viral pneumonia? Got those sequences?

nature.com/articles/s4158…

I continue to be shocked that even the basics aren’t being checked.

The basics.

Get the data, sample history, methods. Check if you can independently reproduce the work (genome, figs) using only the original data provided.

If data isn’t shared, don’t rely on their findings.

We need peer review to become open for at least all of the covid-related papers during the course of this pandemic.

Scientists and editors are all stretched to the limit, so we need to be able to quickly see whether proper peer review was performed, if the basics were checked.