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Dog's Breakfast Profile picture
@breakfast_dogs
Jan 7 • 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…
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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. Image
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. Image
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…

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The Genbank entry shows the sequence came from the AMMS.

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

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

Dog's Breakfast Profile picture
Jun 7
Evolutionary Mysteries of ORF8

ORF8 has no role in attachment or fusion, SARS-CoV-2 can replicate without it. It doesn't form part of a virion, but is secreted by infected cells. It is immunogenic, and prone to mutations. It is a known virulence factor.

vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/odd-struc…

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ORF8 only exists in sarbecovs. ORF8 of SARS-1 and SARS-CoV-2 share just 20% nucleotide identity, compared to 79% average across the genome. But important features defining the protein structure are conserved e.g. cysteine residues forming internal disulfide bonds. Image
These structural features are conserved in a broader class of proteins- Immunoglobulin (IG) domains. ORF7 has similar IG domain structure, and ORF8 may have evolved from it as a template, at some stage acquiring a long insert. Image
Read 26 tweets
Dog's Breakfast Profile picture
May 24
What keeps Peter Hotez awake at night?

ICYMI I once managed to get Hotez to answer a few questions on Twitter about his PLA employees. Interestingly, he seemed relieved once he knew I wasn't asking about vaccines. 👇


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@loofymectin asked me what type of Covid vaccine he made, tbh I hadn't looked into it, being more interested in origins.

It turns out Corbevax is a subunit vaccine based on the RBD of spike, the same type he was researching with his PLA friends Yusen Zhou and Lanying Du. Image
The *legitimate* work of Lanying Du (and colleagues like Fang Li) for several years has been to solve key problems with this type of vaccine. Much of this was sponsored by Peter Hotez as NIH's PI, so he should know all about it. Image
Read 14 tweets
Dog's Breakfast Profile picture
Apr 15
Is the Middle East Respiratory virus also artificial?

Like SARS, MERS is assumed by most scientists to be zoonotic virus, descended from bat coronaviruses. While I don't dispute this, in both cases, the question of how they evolved to make the species jump is unanswered. Image
In 2005-06 while hunting for SARS-like bat coronaviruses in rural Hong Kong, scientists from HKU discovered two new coronaviruses HKU4 and HKU5. These are the first known MERS-like viruses (or merbecovs), although MERS itself was unknown at the time. Image
In 2009-10 a German group including Christian Drosten, Jan Felix Drexler and @vmcorman found group 2 coronaviruses that were similar to HKU4/HKU5 in bats from the Netherlands, though they only sequenced the RdRp, not the full genome (or even the spike gene). Image
Read 26 tweets
Dog's Breakfast Profile picture
Apr 4
The BANALity of Evil

Early sequences supporting a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2 all came from WIV and the PLA. In time, concerns about their provenance would inevitably bubble up from the realms of "conspiracy theorists". Independent validation was needed.

Enter the Bat-ANALs. Image
The BANAL viruses were the result of an expedition to bat caves in Laos in July 2020. Pasteur had been part of a group exploring the same caves 3 years earlier, but they never sequenced the >500 bat samples they collected. Pasteur's Marc Eloit didn't respond when I asked why not.
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The 2020 field trip was intended to involve others, including a team from Vietnam, and some from Institut Pasteur Shanghai. Ultimately it appears these groups didn't participate. Two months before the expedition a PLA delegation visited the IP du Laos outpost.

h/t @tommy_cleary


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Read 41 tweets
Dog's Breakfast Profile picture
Mar 27
Smelling a RaT - a reminder of WIV's deceit.

When I first posted this long thread yesterday I omitted a very important paper from the timeline h/t @worldwhatisup @Rossana38510044

This part of the story deserves a separate (short) thread...

In January 2018, PLA epidemiologists from Nanjing Command and a scientist from Zhejiang University posted some SARS-like bat viruses (ZXC21/ZC45) from Zhoushan, which is on the East Coast near Shanghai, nowhere near the Yunnan province SARS-like viruses were previously found.
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The Vision Medicals Lab in Beijing were first (that we know of) to sequence SARS-CoV-2 and they immediately recognized it as being most similar to the Zhoushan viruses. Although not close enough to be a direct precursor, they share distinctive features. Image
Read 17 tweets
Dog's Breakfast Profile picture
Mar 26
Why did the CCP *murder* their own doctors?

Some of us are desensitized to CCP abuse of political dissenters. The murder of a few outspoken doctors doesn't really shock. But these deaths have broader significance.

They lead us to ask: did the CCP spread the virus deliberately? Image
@Dali_Yang has recently written a book documenting the early days of the pandemic. There was over a month between the earliest cases and any attempt to stem transmission. With prompt action a pandemic could have been averted.

Review by @mattridley👇

thecritic.co.uk/issues/march-2…
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Yang blames local officials, communication failures and mal-incentives in a fragmented bureaucracy. Aside from mild criticism for lax supervision of their underlings, he exonerates Beijing and praises Xi Jinping. This is how the CCP wants the story told.

@mattridley differs 👇 Image
Read 49 tweets

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