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Dog's Breakfast

Jan 7, 2024 • 9 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X

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The research group of former PLA scientist Yigang Tong has published a new paper showing a "pangolin" coronavirus (GX_P2V) variant is 100% fatal to hACE2 mice likely due to infection of the brain.

biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Although previous studies the group did (including a collaboration with WIV) did not show this lethality, they now suggest that mutations gained through passaging in cell culture may have resulted in a far more lethal variant.

But the provenance of this virus is still dubious. Did it really come from pangolins?

Although the paper offers references regarding the identification and isolation of GX_P2V there is no info in these on who isolated it, when and how.

A Tong paper from Feb 2020 suggests Tong's group (though it's written in the passive voice). But it references the Tommy Lam/Eddie Holmes paper as the source. And their paper doesn't say either.

journals.lww.com/cmj/Fulltext/2…

The Genbank entry shows the sequence came from the AMMS.

And another AMMS officer Ruifu Yang separately indicated it came from "certain [secret] institutions".

Yigang Tong now states his affiliation as Beijing Institute for Chemical Technolgy but he has a long history at AMMS, and did his PhD there.

A recruitment notice for his new group provides some interesting biographical details.

scc.pku.edu.cn/download.actio…

Between 2016-2019 when AMMS isolated the pangolin coronavirus, Tong was working on a major secret research project with a USD 5 million budget.

The main duties of his new recruit include "optimization of coronavirus GX_P2V virus infection system" 😬

Perhaps this new potentially human lethal version indicates the optimization was successful?

Interestingly Yigang Tong has been quite insistent that Racoon Dogs and Huanan market were NOT the source of SARS-CoV-2. This is consistent with George Gao's comments on the subject. Clearly China's official line is still that pangolins are to blame.

english.scio.gov.cn/pressroom/node…

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Dog's Breakfast

@breakfast_dogs

Apr 15

The French Enlightenment

Recently French state media broadcast a documentary skeptical of a natural origin of Covid-19.

This is a watershed in European coverage, and follows tantalizing rumors from German and Italian IC sources.

How sincere is this new openness? 🧵

The media coverage appeared to trigger further action - the French Academy of Medicine declared a lab accident possible, and a group of scientists is calling for a parliamentary commission.

Some French scientists have long been open to an artificial origin - but nuance matters.

These include Institut Pasteur's Marc Eloit, author of the Banal sequences These lack an FCS, so leave open that it was artificially inserted.

But they paper over other suspect features e.g. the RBM/NTD with human respiratory and neuro-tropism.

Can this really evolve in bats?

Read 29 tweets

Dog's Breakfast

@breakfast_dogs

Apr 2

Batsh|t Betsy

@quay_dr recently posted a preprint showing the sequence for bat coronavirus BtSY2 can't be assembled from the raw sequencing data. This is a serious issue.

But there's a Nature paper with Eddie Holmes' name on it.

It got past peer review, so who's right?

🧵

BtSY2 is very important as it's one of only zoonotic viruses 6 with an RBM very close to SARS-CoV-2 - potentially human infectious. It was published in 2023 by Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, with Eddie Holmes along for the ride.

@quay_dr *maybe* missed some data from a second sample they used in their assembly. But this doesn't materially affect his conclusion, as most of these reads overlap.

If he did, he can be excused for missing it because there's a lot of obfuscation that appears quite deliberate.

Read 21 tweets

Dog's Breakfast

@breakfast_dogs

Mar 24

Mojiang Mythbusting Part 2

It's crucial to realize the extent of WIV's deceit. They didn't start lying in 2020. Every paper since 2003 helped craft a false narrative. Their goal was misattributing the origin of SARS.

What does this say about the intent behind SARS-CoV-2? 🧵

That WIV discovered RaTG13 in the Mojiang mine seems highly unlikely. Other groups before and after found little, and even WIV claim to have found just 1 SARS-related virus from 276 bats sampled.

Why did they persist when they later say the miners had never been seropositive?

The master's thesis published in May 2013, clearly had some input from WIV. But this paragraph was already outdated. WIV uploaded the first bat viruses with human infectious potential just weeks earlier (tho dates don't quite match and location is just "China").

Read 17 tweets

Dog's Breakfast

@breakfast_dogs

Mar 13

https://twitter.com/Engineer2The/status/1900280768469033185

Was SARS-CoV-2 targeted at our brains?

In 1992, scientists infected primates with a neurotropic strain of mouse coronavirus MHV. This caused a demyelinating disease similar to multiple sclerosis.

This was to understand MS, but drew the interest of the likes of Baric and Weiss.

https://twitter.com/Engineer2The/status/1900280768469033185

Although the experiment used intracerebral inoculation, a clearly unnatural method of bypassing the blood-brain barrier, the researchers suggested that it may be possible for CNS infection to occur naturally, via the nose or eyes (as had long been known to occur in mice).

A later study showed that primate CNS could indeed be infected via the nasal route (using a primate brain passaged strain of MHV). They also inoculated these monkeys using eye drops.

Read 7 tweets

Dog's Breakfast

@breakfast_dogs

Feb 23

Is Banal-52 fake, and does it matter?

Most people just assume Banal-52 is real. Institut Pasteur has a high reputation. And may think it doesn't matter: because the FCS is absent, it doesn't rule out a lab origin.

But it can tell us why SARS-CoV-2 was engineered, and by who 🧵

Banal-52 shares many features with SARS-CoV-2 linked to tropism, transmissibility, virulence. The FCS is a rare exception.

If it is genuine, it implies these evolved naturally. Daszak has a point. Caves are teeming with pandemic potential viruses that could spillover any time.

But if it is fake, it implies SARS-CoV-2 has been engineered extensively. It is neither natural, nor an "experiment gone wrong". It isn't just a bat virus into which someone stupid inserted an FCS. It has multiple features intended to harm human health.

It is a bioweapon.

Read 14 tweets

Dog's Breakfast

@breakfast_dogs

Feb 18

How did the coronavirus get its RBM?

Some time ago SARS-1 and SARS-CoV-2 had a common ancestor. Parts of their genomes are similar, but many functionally important regions are very different. These appear to have evolved by a very unusual - or unnatural -
cut-and-paste process🧵

Molecular evolution has well established mechanisms:

•substitution (frequent) a single base changes to another
•deletion (uncommon) usually only a few, and a multiple of 3 is preferred
•inserts (rare) as above
•recombination (very rare)

There's another type of mutation unusually common between SARS-1 and SARS-CoV-2: where a new sequence has been grafted in place of another. There's no simple explanation. Perhaps they result from 2 or more separate insert/deletion events?

Or they may indicate engineering.

Read 27 tweets

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