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Steve Massey Profile picture
@stevenemassey
Mar 12 • 7 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
It has been reported German Intel has assessed that COVID19 originated via a lab leak

Swiss paper NZZ reports that our discovery of a MERS-related infectious clone with a chimeric spike from Wuhan sequencing datasets was considered by German Intel 🧵 Image
2/ The study by @humblesci @Daoyu15 @BiophysicsFL @ydeigin @quay_dr and myself was published last year and demonstrated unreported GOF experimentation on novel MERS-related coronaviruses in Wuhan prior to the pandemic
fortunejournals.com/articles/disco…
3/ Concerningly, we found evidence that a MERS spike (with FCS) was inserted into a HKU4r-CoV backbone, likely enhancing transmissibility in human cells, as the RBD is expected to have a high binding affinity for the hDPP4 receptor

Here is a thread on the preprint version of the paper:
4/ NZZ states that the initial assessment by German Intel was low (left figure), while reports in German papers Süddeutsche Zeitung and Zeit states the assessment is now 80-95 % (right figure) Image
Image
5/ It seems that important ongoing sources of information utilized by intel services have been obtained from X, and demonstrates the power of decentralized investigation (and fundamental flaws in legacy academia)

#DRASTIC #DeSci

6/ The NZZ article can be found here:

nzz.ch/international/…

And Zeit article here (h/t @KatherineEban ):

archive.is/AEdZv#selectio…
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More from @stevenemassey

Steve Massey Profile picture
Feb 26
Pekar et al have published a paper claiming that 2 SARS2 A/B intermediates from Feb 2020 are derived rather than ancestral

The existence of ancestral intermediates would falsify Pekar et al's earlier claim of 2 independent spillovers of lineages A and B at the Huanan Market 🧵 Image
2/ Hence Pekar et al undergo extraordinary convolutions in order to try and claim the 2 A/B intermediates, identified by Lv et al 2024, are late arrivals rather than the original intermediates that led to the evolution of lineage B from lineage A

academic.oup.com/ve/article/10/…
3/ To sum, they once again (ab)use modeling to support intuitively unlikely scenarios

They claim it is more likely that the 2 Lv et al intermediates arose from either Hu-1 (lin B), or its closest lin A relative (C8782T,T28144C) AFTER the 2 lineages had originally split
Read 9 tweets
Steve Massey Profile picture
Nov 2, 2024
'Conincidentally' we showed pUC57 was also used to clone a genome fragment from an unpublished pangolin-related SARS2r-CoV from China 🧵

h/t @humblesci @Daoyu15 @ydeigin @quay_dr

mdpi.com/2673-8007/2/4/…

x.com/Engineer2The/s…
2/ This striking conincidence indicates that the novel pangolin-related coronavirus we identified from contaminated datasets (GX_ZX45r-CoV) was likely part of an infectious clone (IC), given that one of the reads was ligated to pUC57

From our paper: Image
3/ This can be inferred given that ZLS et al report using pUC57 for cloning genome fragments of HKU5 coronavirus prior to assembly into an IC in their recent Nature paper on engineering coronavirus receptors

h/t @Engineer2The Image
Read 6 tweets
Steve Massey Profile picture
Sep 18, 2024
I have published a paper on my analysis of the RaTG13 dataset

RaTG13 is the closest phylogenomic relative of SARS2

Transcriptome and GO enrichment analysis indicates the likely source of the dataset is a bat mating plug, rather than a fecal swab 🧵

mdpi.com/2036-7481/15/3…
A mating plug provenance resolves the long standing conundrum over the low amounts of bacteria in the RaTG13 sample, noted by @MonaRahalkar and others, which is inconsistent with a fecal swab as reported by the WIV, who collected the sample
I presented the evidence for a mating plug provenance in a previous thread 👇
Read 10 tweets
Steve Massey Profile picture
Sep 8, 2024
A leak of polio from a research facility is indicated by a poliovirus genome sequence generated from a sample collected in 2014 in China by the Wuhan Institute of Virology

The sequence is 99 % identical to that of a polio strain from 1954 🧵
academic.oup.com/ve/article/10/…
2/ Chesnais et al sequenced 3 poliovirus genomes recovered from 60 year old historic samples generated by Albert Sabin at the Pasteur Institute, Paris

Sabin is the father of the oral polio vaccine, created from attenuated polio strains
Image
Image
3/ Poliovirus is a single stranded positive sense RNA virus, that only naturally infects humans (no other natural hosts are known)

There are 3 poliovirus serotypes: PV-1, PV-2 and PV-3 Image
Read 28 tweets
Steve Massey Profile picture
Jul 26, 2024
Why are virologists freely allowed to anonymize lethal synthetic viruses, but developers are put in jail for writing code that anonymize bitcoin transactions ?

Genetically enhanced infectious clones present a much higher risk than anonymous monetary transactions 🧵 Image
@R_H_Ebright @SenGaryPeters @COVIDSelect @BiosafetyNow @CharlesRixey @HSGAC_GOP @RepBradWenstrup @RepRaulRuizMD Virologists often synthesize infectious clones (ICs), which are used to produce live infectious viruses

To make an IC of a coronavirus, due to its large size constituent fragments need to be synthesized, and then ligated together to form a complete genome
Unique restriction (cut) sites at the ends of the fragments allow them to be assembled in the correct order

These are often left in the genome as a signature of the ligation, as in this SARS1-related IC by ZLS and Daszak

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jv…
Image
Read 29 tweets
Steve Massey Profile picture
Jun 25, 2024
Unravelling the RaTG13 Dataset's Origin

The RaTG13 dataset has overexpressed transcripts which indicate it was mis-sampled from a bat mating plug

This provides a reasonable explanation for anomalies in the dataset, described as a 'fecal swab' 🧵 Image
2/ RaTG13 is (still) phylogenomically the closest coronavirus backbone to SARS2

There has been a longstanding controversy regarding the origin of the RaTG13 dataset

RaTG13 is described as being generated from a Rhinolophus affinis (Intermediate Horseshoe bat) fecal swab Image
3/ However, the dataset has few bacteria which is inconsistent with a fecal swab, given that fecal material is dominated by bacteria

Read 47 tweets

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