Thread by @edwardcholmes

I trust the FBI/DoE will add this to their evidence dossier. I have sent all the associated files and emails for what follows to a number of people including WHO/SAGO so that everything that follows can be verified.
1/14

In July 2022 163 bat CoV sequences from the WIV appeared on GenBank, including from bat virus RaTG13 (originally called Ra4991). ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/MH6…. These relate to this paper from *2018* led by my former postdoc Jie Cui.
2/14

Jie wanted to determine the origins of SARS-CoV: “I asked my people sequenced more than 50 bat SARS viruses elsewhere in China, to see whether there are viruses circulated in the southern China to support a virus movement from Yunnan to Guangdong.”
3/14

Aim was better data: “Previously all bat coronavirus papers used a partial RdRp gene, ~440bp in length, which I don't think is good for phylogenetic analysis. I asked them to sequence the complete coding region of RdRp (not easy to get...), 2.7kb in length, in this project”.
4/12

The paper was a simple evolutionary study of 60 novel bat SARSr-CoVs from China. The sequences cover 60 full-length RdRp genes (inc. RaTG13), 49 full-length S genes and 54 ORF8 sequences. The main conclusion was that human SARS-CoV (SARS-CoV-1) originated in Yunnan province.
5/14

This paper was rejected by three journals in 2018. It was withdrawn in October 2018 because the reviewers wanted whole genomes. As Jie says: “So Dr. Zheng-Li Shi and I are going to retract this paper and put more efforts on getting more full length genomes in the future”.
6/14

The 163 sequences from this paper were sent to GenBank in July 2018 with a 4-year embargo on the release date which is why they appeared in July 2022. Everything in the paper was released. Because the paper was withdrawn the authors forgot the future release date.
7/14

RaTG13/Ra4991 was the *only* SARS-CoV-2-like virus sequenced (bottom tip in tree) and was not mentioned. No S gene sequence was obtained for this virus. The only mention of tree lineage 4 was that it “comprised nine far more divergent SARSr-CoV strains sampled in Yunnan”.
8/12

Critically, this paper was submitted *before* the COVID-19 pandemic when there would be no need to ‘hide’ data. It does not contain a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor and provides no evidence for a virus closer to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13/Ra4991 at the WIV. Nor is RaTG13 a fake.
9/14

The paper concluded “more widespread geographic sampling is clearly needed to fully resolve the origin of SARS-CoV, particularly as ORF8 genes with identical deletions to those seen in SARS-CoVs have yet to be found in bat SARSr-CoVs”.
10/14

This paper confirms what Zhengli Shi has said on RaTG13. No whole genome sequence was available for that virus and the WIV was clearly focused on SARS-CoV. These are the viruses they’ve isolated and cultured. There are no more viruses from the Mojiang mine.
11/14

The question that follows is why the WIV would then do GoF work on a divergent bat virus of no evolutionary nor biological importance and for which there was no complete genome sequence?
12/14

I had forgotten about this paper until the sequences were released on GenBank. I had forgotten because it was never published and all my emails were with Jie Cui (not Zhengli Shi) – a former postdoc I was helping and who normally worked on endogenous viruses/influenza.
13/14

This unpublished paper provides a snapshot of what bat CoV sequencing was going on at the WIV up to end of 2018. It was not easy to get whole virus genomes. A lab origin of COVID-19 would be proven if the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 was in these data. It’s not.
14/14