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Francisco de Asis Profile picture
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24 Jul, 13 tweets, 5 min read
[Thread] New unforced error. GIABR, the lab of the pangolins, has just uploaded sequences (MW600658:MW600715) that shows a trip to the Mojiang mineshaft or nearby on 22-Aug-2017, well after the last known trip of WIV in 2015.
Libiao Zhang explicitly credited as collector.
Some context: Very few CoVs published with collection date after 2016 by Chinese institutions

WIV used two main series of sample IDs (NNNN, e.g. 4991; and YYNNNN, e.g. 162387) plus some ad-hoc series.
We discovered yesterday that one of them was from GIABR.
And it has sense, because Libiao Zhang (GIABR) was probably the largest bat samples collector for WIV:
A new thesis of Fan (2019) credited Libiao Zhang as collector and used a sample (BtCoV/Tp/YN/162250) that sits in the middle of the 2016 series just published by GIABR.
Another proof of how they shared samples and series of sample IDs.
How do we know? With a phylogeographic analysis of alphaCoVs. We have metadata of previously submitted sequences, plus more we deduced (including 1,322 samples of the mine).
They probably thought that, omitting betaCoVs, uploading alphaCoVs was not risky
And another trip in 2016 again?
There are up to 57 samples unaccounted on 15 & 16-Aug-16 (and maybe 17th)
Notes:
- 162250 might be also 17-Aug-16
- Tp and Tr only found in Mengla (PREDICT)
- It is irrelevant the exact location of prev. and next samples, Mojiang is not far anyway
We were really lucky because we know the collection date of 162387 also, thanks to the example given by Shi for her deleted DB
Quick reminder: Samples 7896 (MN312322 & MN312671) and 7931 (MN312339 & MN312672) are co-infections of an AlphaCoV HKU2 and a SARS-like.
So, GIABR can have SARS2-like viruses in their lab. Noticed or unnoticed.
This gives more weight to the lab contamination hypothesis for the pangolins. If they have alphaCoVs from the mineshaft or nearby, they should have SARS-like too.
It is plausible that the spike was in GIABR which unnoticingly contaminated pangolins samples
Here the data.
- New sequences in green
- Location is APPROX according to the phylogeographic analysis
- Not conclusive where they where on 15-Aug-17
- At least from 21-Aug-17 in Yunnan
- Consistent with other sources (Zhou et al., 2018; Fan, 2019; the DB; Luo et al., 2018)
Credits: @babarlelephant (finding the new accessions and a match with Jinning), #DRASTIC & friends.
So, again:
And Genbank accessions: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/?term=…

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More from @franciscodeasis

Francisco de Asis Profile picture
17 Jul
[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
Read 15 tweets
Francisco de Asis Profile picture
16 Jul
[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.
16-Dec-19 is the correct onset day for the Wuchang accountant. It was artificially advanced 8 days by CCP officials.
Read 11 tweets
Francisco de Asis Profile picture
20 Jun
"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.”
Read 5 tweets
Francisco de Asis Profile picture
20 Jun
[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…
Read 14 tweets
Francisco de Asis Profile picture
19 Jun
"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"
Read 6 tweets
Francisco de Asis Profile picture
30 May
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
Read 4 tweets

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