Thread by @mormo_music

i deleted my most shared tweet. rip. i believe the part about '1 in a billion' is too ambiguous and/or not supported. i don't know how we'd approach putting a likelihood on the #CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG sequence in moderna's patents coincidentally also ending up in SARS-CoV-2

the rest of the original thread here: rest of the original thread here:

https://twitter.com/mormo_music/status/1481897913781559296

the 1 in a billion claim can make sense if simplifying each 'slot' in a genome to something like the wheel of a fruit machine, pulling the lever, and checking the output for occurrences of the query string.

but to get a sense of how likely the coincidence is in real life: we'd want to know what the most similar viral sequences in the wild are, what the mutation rate of these viruses is (ht @mittelwertsatz), estimate transmission rate and host population, ctd

and try to figure out the odds of the most evolutionarily viable set of mutations getting from A to B, occurring. and even then we're not taking into account all the existing viruses we don't currently know about.

this 19n sequence for a furin cleavage site appears in moderna's pre pandemic patents, and in SARS-CoV-2, and nowhere else before the pandemic as far as we know. #CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG

bigger brains that mine might be able to talk more insightfully re. odds of such a coincidence.