Thread by @Ayjchan

Several scientists are reasonably curious about what the issues are with most prominent papers describing the same Guangdong pangolin CoV that shares a very similar spike RBD with SARS2.

On Nov 11, @Nature put an editor's note on one of these papers... nature.com/articles/s4158…

If you're deeply curious about this, you should send an email to @Nature asking them to publish the authors' original response to the manuscript @shingheizhan and I submitted to them last May. We also recommend asking to see the peer reviewer comments. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Honestly, it's taking a lot of my will power not to just post these publicly so everyone can take a good look.

On the other paper in @PLOSPathogens who were also alerted in May 2020, but have not bothered to post any editor's note or expression of concern on the article almost one year later...
journals.plos.org/plospathogens/…

I invite you to read these emails published by @USRightToKnow especially the ones with the editor of the paper, Dr Stanley Perlman.

usrtk.org/biohazards-blo…

Since publishing these initial (still uncorrected) papers, the same authors have gone on to release more manuscripts on the same pangolin CoV.

The @nature authors posted this preprint in June 2020 with new co-authors. Unsure where it is in peer review. biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

In our preprint, we point out that "on June 22, 2020, Xiao et al. added a new sample, pangolin_10 to their Nature paper’s bioproject.. it is very likely that the first public description of pangolin_10 can instead be found in their recent Li et al." biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

I know this sounds enormously technical, but you should see what is in the authors' response and how they explain these observations.

Last month, the @PLOSPathogens authors, who afaik still haven't produced the data they claimed to use in their May 2020 paper, published this new paper with some very short sequence fragments closely matching those of the GD pangolin CoV.
frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…

I don't know what else to say... this new paper talks about the same batches of pangolins as their @PLOSPathogens paper, for which the data has not been shared yet.

Brought to you by people who claim no relationship with @nature authors despite co-publishing the first pangolin CoV dataset (Oct 2019) that they then split up and used in their separate papers (Feb 2020) to produce 99.95% identical pangolin CoV genomes. usrtk.org/biohazards-blo…

Their March 2021 paper says that they found a total of 5 (out of 50) pangolins that tested positive for the CoV. "three healthy and two dead."

Can you please match them up to the CoV+ pangolins in the @nature paper as well as the 2019 Liu et al. Viruses paper that you authored?

Liu et al. 2019 - same senior author as the March 2021 paper - "We collected 21 organ samples of lung, lymph, and spleen with obvious symptoms from 11 dead Malayan pangolins" from an original 21 pangolins in a March 2019 batch.
mdpi.com/1999-4915/11/1…

Xiao et al. 2020 @nature "obtained the lung tissues from 4 Chinese pangolins (Manis pentadactyla) and 25 Malayan pangolins (Manis javanica).. March–August 2019.. virus-positive Malayan pangolins were all from the first transport" nature.com/articles/s4158…

Liu et al. 2020 @PLOSPathogens - same senior author March 2021 paper - "March and July of 2019, we detected Betacoronaviruses in three individuals from two sets of smuggled Malayan pangolins.. (n = 27) .. all three animals suffered.. respiratory disease" journals.plos.org/plospathogens/…

Li et al. 2020 @biorxivpreprint - same senior authors @nature - "we studied 28 Malayan pangolins that were confiscated in Guangdong Province between March-August 2019.. 15 animals, including six pregnant females, naturally infected by the virus" biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Different batch of authors Choo et al. 2020 "At the end of March 2019.. Of these 103 living pangolins, 21 of them were transferred to the Guangdong wildlife rescue center.. Sixteen.. died quickly.. five pangolins alive by mid-April.. We analyzed two" conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.11…

This whole Guangdong pangolin saga is starting to become some kind of mathematical riddle.

So many groups are publishing data off the same batch (or two) of pangolins confiscated in China. Each study providing a different account of how many were healthy or sick or CoV+.

Nearly missed one more recent preprint - by authors from the Choo et al. paper - "we investigated a possible pCoV skin infection in a Malayan pangolin named “Dahu” seized by customs in the Guangdong province (China) before dying"
researchsquare.com/article/rs-354…

I don't think it's possible to tell from all of these papers which samples were taken from which pangolins, and how many actually were CoV+. You'd have to conduct an investigation interviewing the authors implicated across these papers and preprints to get the answers.

What we do know is that the 2 peer-reviewed papers @nature @PLOSPathogens publishing near identical GD pangolin CoV genome primarily based on same dataset (one is on GenBank, the other is in GISAID) suffer from considerable scientific issues. Our analysis: biorxiv.org/content/10.110…