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Yuri Deigin Profile picture
@ydeigin
Apr 2 • 3 tweets • 2 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
Whoa, was the 2021 Ebola outbreak caused by a lab leak? Because in 2021 it was the same human-adapted strain as was previously seen in the 2014 outbreak — i.e. there were so few novel mutations between them that the virus was essentially frozen for 5 years (just as in the 1977… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
The source publication:

nature.com/articles/s4158…

(H/t @kellywind)
PS: ironically, in the case of the 1977 H1N1 flu lab leak, virologists initially also hypothesized that the virus must have been “frozen” in some humans or animals:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

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More from @ydeigin

Yuri Deigin Profile picture
Mar 6
1/n
The Wuhan CDC is back in focus after reports that it was the reason behind DOE changing its Covid origin assessment to a possible lab leak. Really curious what data led to that conclusion, hope they'll declassify it! For now, let me share some observations about Wuhan CDC:
2/n
WHCDC was, of course, an early lab leak suspect, as outlined in a Feb 2020 preprint by Xiao & Xiao where they pointed to Junhua Tian (JHT)’s interest in bat ticks, as well as his statements about having to quarantine after being attacked by bats:
web.archive.org/web/2020021414…
3/n
 In 2021 WaPo wrote an interesting profile of Junhua Tian:

“Tian is by title an associate chief technician in the Wuhan CDC’s pest-control department, but he has a reputation as a swaggering adventurer in his work with bats and insects."

washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pac…
Read 14 tweets
Yuri Deigin Profile picture
Mar 4
At the protein level the BANAL-52 spike is ~99% identical to the pre-FCS SARS2 spike, and its RBD (responsible for binding to the ACE2 receptor) differs by just 1 aa. Other BANAL genes are 98-99% identical to SARS2. So BANAL-52+FCS itself would do quite well at human spillover. Image
Of course a lab in Wuhan could have had a BANAL-like bat strain even closer to SARS2 than strains found in Laos in 2020. The point is, all it takes for a BANAL-like virus to become human-transmissible is an FCS, as it opens up respiratory tropism. Some papers:
researchsquare.com/article/rs-180…
Read 4 tweets
Yuri Deigin Profile picture
Feb 26
Yes, WIV (with funding from NIAID and USAID via EcoHealth) was creating SARS-like chimeras and using them to infect cell cultures with live viruses — all in merely BSL2 conditions.
Here is the 2017 paper in which they created 8 SARS-like chimeras:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
And here is the 2016 paper reporting the creation of their WIV1 reverse genetics system (under BSL2 conditions):

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
Read 4 tweets
Yuri Deigin Profile picture
Feb 11
So I wanted to check just how routine those P8 flights over the Baltic were. I found this one account @AIYeyENGDdJkjTr that tracks all sorts of military flights. I don't know how exhaustive it is but it only shows a handful of P8 flights over the Baltic in the prior months:
The most recent such P8 flight before the Nord Stream explosions occurred overnight between Sep 25-25. It is actually interesting because if went off radar for 4+ hours between 20:36 and 01:13 (UTC). Here's its track:

globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae6893&l…
The one before it was on Sep 10:

globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae67f7&l…
Read 6 tweets
Yuri Deigin Profile picture
Dec 7, 2022
1/n
I can't get the SARS2 glycans out of my head -- I think Andersen's initial intuition in 2020 that there's something off about them was not unfounded. The O-linked glycans that could shield the newly created FCS due to the proline in the PRRA insertion I discussed below, but
2/n
 I also keep coming back to this DEFUSE quote about N-linked glycans that could play a role in DC-SIGN binding, and how original bat viruses have them but strains that spilled over to intermediate hosts don't, and how DEFUSE authors were planning to play with N-glycan sites:
3/n
 Now, taking a look at predicted N-linked glycans in SARS2-like CoVs, I noticed that a site in the RBD closest to the RBM (N379), which is present in BANAL-52, RaTG13, and BtSY2, is actually absent in SARS2 (along with N39, but SARS2 gained N83):
Read 6 tweets
Yuri Deigin Profile picture
Nov 23, 2022
1/
 Back in Feb 2020 Eddie Holmes pointed out that even inside China many people find the lab leak hypothesis plausible (cue Angie accusing them of sinophobia).

Also, how in the world does the "pangolin virus" make the natural hypothesis more plausible? It doesn't have the FCS;
2/
 pangolins were never sold in Wuhan; and it might not even be a pangolin virus -- the lab (GIABR) which published that virus also sampled the same bats that host BANAL strains (which also don't have an FCS),

3/
and there are other observations in the sequencing data of that "pangolin virus" to suggest that it might be a bat virus contaminating the pangolin dataset:

arxiv.org/abs/2108.08163
Read 5 tweets

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