[Thread] Necessary corrections to the China-WHO report.
What they will probably fix and what they will not.
TLDR: circular swap of 3 IPCAMS genomes + tampered onset of Wuchang accountant; First patients and first cluster; Some falsehoods in articles washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pac…
As we said, the problems were with S01, S05 & S11. Absolutely chaotic, but with a little table it is all more clear. Part of the problem is inherited from Ren et al. (2020) who followed different orders in the text and in the genomes for the patients.
The Wuchang accountant and nephew of a doctor of the hospital (Central) was probably a most convenient 1st case, and Lineage B!
(Image from China-WHO report annex D1 - Xinhua Hospital)
Holmes et al. (2021) also found something was wrong with S01. Although they did not solve the whole jigsaw puzzle (as part of their cherry picking, I guess)
How can they change now the info of the wife of the 62-year-old man (62M) stated in the China WHO-report? Incredible!
62M (some sources said "in his seventies" or "elderly") had that initial onset on Dec 1st (Huang et al., 2020).
But seems that Huang et al. (2020) hid the h2h evidence, if we trust China-WHO report and Xinhuanet. @TheLancet please clarify/correct/retract. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
Thanks to them, Dr. Jixian Zhang alerted of very probable h2h on Dec 27th. But we only knew that -and limited- on Jan 20th, 24 days later.
Shame! xinhuanet.com/english/2020-0…
62M is also "ICU-01" in Zhou et al. (2020) whose "contact history [with wet market] is unclear"
Why nothing was sequenced? Did they sequenced the wife? Who is the wife? 49F or one of the 3 ICU patients omitted by Zhou et al. (2020)? nature.com/articles/s4158… nature.com/articles/s4158…
From the WaPo article:
"Jasarevic said mistakes in the report were due to “editing errors,” but they did not affect “the data analysis process, nor the conclusions.”"
No comments!
[Thread] Who is the first known patient?
There is a lot of confusion, so let's review all possible patients according published onset dates [of symptoms] up to 15-Dec-19.
Notation
Patients are anonymized, so they are identified as <AgeSex> (e.g. 49F is a 49-year-old female). In case there are many patients with same age & sex, suffixes are used (e.g. 65M1, 65M2, ...).
U = Unknown.
Problem: people can have birthday during illness
XX Su (61F), XX Wang (62M) & XX X (UU) onset 14, 21 & c. 30-Nov-19.
Info unnoticingly leaked in Health Times and uncovered by DRASTIC and @ianbirrell
"It shows how an authoritarian government can successfully shape the narrative of a disease outbreak and how it can take years — and, perhaps, regime change — to get to the truth"
"“You can concoct a completely crazy story and make it plausible by the way you design it,” Dr. Meselson said, explaining why the Soviets had succeeded in dispelling suspicions about a lab leak"
“Those who don’t want to accept the truth will always find ways not to accept it.”
[Thread] Bat tissue collection and cell lines from the 3rd trip to Tongguan (TG) mine in Mojiang in Apr-2013
The 3rd trip is still my first guess for being the trip of live isolate WIV15 (and backbone). I guess it is more probable to isolate a virus from tissue itself... What do the experts say?
Jan 7, 2021, AVC Panel Discussion Origins of SARS-CoV-2 (from @KatherineEban's article)
“the incredible difficulty of isolating live virus from bat samples, which are usually fecal samples, and that this is extremely unreliable and usually not successful” downloads.vanityfair.com/lab-leak-theor…
"The mounting evidence that the COVID-19 coronavirus escaped from the WIV, rather than spontaneously emerging from nature, had become the hottest topic in journalism and potentially the most consequential science story in a generation" commentarymagazine.com/articles/james…
"The COVID-19 pandemic revealed a profound corruption at the heart of our expert class. The impact of that revelation will reverberate for years to come"
"“The DRASTIC people are doing better research than the U.S. government,” a State Department investigator told Vanity Fair"
The previous mainstream narrative of "anything outside of a zoonosis is a conspiracy theory" was built upon two letters (not articles), among most cited papers of the year. Even Dr. Shi used them. They are both sinking now.
1/ The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2
The corresponding author is self-debunking, and a co-author was de-facto retracting
2/ Lancet's letter (or Daszak's letter)
It did not fare any better. It was proved orchestrated by @PeterDaszak and, AFAIK, at least three co-authors de-facto retracted publicly declaring that the question of the origin was open
They finally concede after more than a year: "Here, we report the identification of a novel lineage of SARSr-CoVs, including RaTG15 and seven other viruses, from bats at the same location where we found RaTG13 in 2015"
No mention to the miners or the mine. Just this: "in Tongguan town, Mojiang county, Yunnan province in China in 2015, the same location where we found bat
RaTG13 in 2013"