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Yuri Deigin

@ydeigin

Dec 18

🧵 Covid Origins: Lab leak critics claim the coincidence of a novel coronavirus emerging near the Wuhan Institute of Virology is dwarfed by the “counter-coincidence” of it first being noticed at a wildlife market. But the market was actually one of the most likely places for a lab-leaked virus to get noticed.

Here’s a clip from my podcast with @robertwrighter and a deep dive in the thread below:

Basically, if we imagine the map of Wuhan as a “probability landscape”, where each location has an inherent probability that a roaming lab-leaked virus would get noticed if it got there, the Huanan seafood market would dominate that landscape like Mount Everest.

Now, let’s walk through the thought experiment: How would a lab-leaked virus get noticed in Wuhan in late 2019?

Read 16 tweets

Yuri Deigin

@ydeigin

Nov 29

Some critics of the Covid lab leak hypothesis say the SARS2 furin cleavage site is unlikely to have been engineered because in previous cases of creating novel FCSes in coronaviruses virologists have never inserted an FCS but rather created them in place via point mutations. But!

A close collaborator of Zhengli Shi and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Shibo Jiang, in 2013 published a paper creating a furin cleavage site in a non-CoV synthetic vector via a 12-nt insertion (note the CGG codon for the leading arginine):

In 2016-17, WIV has created a novel reverse genetics system ("backbone") for the WIV1 virus, and Shibo Jiang subsequently coauthored a paper with Lei-Ping Zeng, the author of that backbone. (Lanying Du, another key collaborator of both WIV and Shibo Jiang, was also on the paper. She was also the editor for the 2013 paper inserting the RIRR FCS):

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC70…

Read 20 tweets

Yuri Deigin

@ydeigin

Jul 13

🚀 More amazing partial reprogramming news! This time from @davidasinclair — he mentioned some unpublished animal results for:

- *reversing* Alzheimer’s symptoms
- hearing loss
- ALS
- glaucoma (anticipating clinical trials in 2025!)
- rejuvenating skin, kidneys and liver

Great to hear that the FDA is ok with Tet-inducible (via rtTA3) partial reprogramming gene therapies, and that Life Bio is so close to the clinic. They presented encouraging results in monkeys in an eye stroke model (NIAON); I didn’t know they also tried a glaucoma monkey model.

PS: while Life Bio seems closest to human clinical trials among partial reprogramming companies, others aren’t far behind:

- Turn Bio with their skin therapy
- we at YouthBio with our Alzheimer’s therapy

Read 6 tweets

Yuri Deigin

@ydeigin

May 8

🧵 I wrote a new Medium article about how Ralph Baric's January 2024 testimony provides new insights into the origins of COVID-19. Check out the article here:

yurideigin.medium.com/why-ralph-bari…

2/
Highlights:

- Ralph Baric confirmed that DEFUSE proposed inserting novel furin cleavage sites into live viruses, inspired by feline coronaviruses
- SARS-CoV-2’s furin cleavage sites is identical to the one found in several lethal feline coronavirus strains
- Ralph Baric strongly believes WIV had unpublished viruses and viral reverse genetics systems
- Most plausible Covid origin is the result of research on identifying new SARS-like viruses and developing broad vaccines against them

3/
Quick Summary:

Ralph Baric’s January 2024 testimony provided crucial insights into the DEFUSE grant proposal, a collaborative project involving EcoHealth and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and the research interests of WIV prior to the Covid outbreak. The pre-Covid landscape of coronavirology research saw intense US-China collaboration aimed at creating broad-spectrum vaccines for SARS- and MERS-like viruses. Key players like Baric, along with researchers Lanying Du, Yusen Zhou, Fang Li, and Shibo Jiang, focused on overcoming challenges such as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). By 2018–2019, as collaboration between Baric and his counterparts shifted, WIV became central in SARS-like virus research.

Drawing on Baric’s testimony, I argue that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan wasn’t coincidental but a likely result of research at WIV. In particular, I outline how WIV researchers, after a post-2018 shift in focus, concentrated on identifying SARS-like viruses with spike proteins 10–25% different from SARS1, capable of evading SARS1-based antibodies, and potentially causing ADE. They were plausibly inspired by Baric’s ideas on furin cleavage sites and his work with Fang Li on SARS and MERS spike cleavage, leading them to engineer furin cleavage sites into novel SARS-like strains. Baric’s testimony suggests that feline coronaviruses inspired this suggestion, and the identical furin cleavage sites in lethal feline coronavirus strains and SARS-CoV-2 strongly indicate that the WIV could have inserted such a site into a SARS-CoV-2 precursor to extend their research from MERS to novel SARS-like coronaviruses. This suggests the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 was not a coincidence but a potential result of this focused research.

Read 39 tweets

Yuri Deigin

@ydeigin

May 2

I was curious to hear Peter Dazsak mention at the @COVIDSelect hearing that prior to the Covid outbreak, he actually met with Dr. (Yi-Gang) Tong who was working on a SARS-like CoV found in pangolin samples. In his Feb 2020 paper, Dr. Tong mentions that they isolated this virus long before the outbreak and routinely cultured it at BSL2. More info in the thread below.

PS: Daszak erroneously claiming in 2020
that WIV didn’t have live bats goes to show that he could well be unaware of what other research relevant to Covid origins WIV was engaged in.

While Dr. Tong's lab is in Beijing, he did collaborate with WIV and EcoHealth previously, e.g. in 2018 on a SADS-CoV paper titled "Fatal swine acute diarrhoea syndrome caused by an HKU2-related coronavirus of bat origin":

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29618817/

But I am more intrigued about the collaboration between Yi-Gang Tong and Yusen Zhou, the author of the Feb 2020 Covid vaccine patent who died a few months later under mysterious circumstances. They both hail from the same "State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity" at the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology. Here is their joint 2016 paper:

ijbs.com/v12p1104.htm

Read 10 tweets

Yuri Deigin

@ydeigin

Apr 22

4 years after my first Medium article on Covid origins, I wrote another one. In it, I make the case that SARS-CoV-2 is precisely the virus WIV was hunting for in 2019.

Below is a thread on the key points:yurideigin.medium.com/sars-cov-2-is-…

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In 2018, WIV started looking for SARS-like viruses that were 10–25% different from SARS1 in their spike but could still enter human cells, and escape SARS1-based antibodies. SARS2 fits those criteria like a glove.

3/

Moreover, as I will show below, precisely because SARS2 or its BANAL-like progenitor could evade SARS1-based vaccines and antibodies, such strains would have been prioritized and likely turned into full-genome synthetic backbones.

Read 97 tweets

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