My take from the latest bat CoV sequences is that it is increasingly likely that the hotspot for SARS-CoV-2-like diversity in not in Yunnan, China, but further south in Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand and Cambodia. These are not locations where the WIV do bat sampling. 1/5 This region is also home to the Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) - the only other animal infected by SARS-CoV-2-like viruses - and is often illegally trafficked. The Sunda pangolin carries two viral lineages closely related to SARS-CoV-2. 2/5

There has been speculation that the origin of COVID-19 may lie with the Wuhan CDC (WCDC) which is located close to the Huanan market. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Yong-Zhen Zhang and so can clarify a few points. 1/6 The WCDC did not perform virological analysis of animal samples. In reality, they were a sample storage and collection location. All the virus work, including RNA extraction, was done in Zhang’s lab in Beijing and later Shanghai. 2/6

Another one for the COVID-19 origins evidence dossier, although this is mainly for the phylogeny geeks. I’ll keep it short.
1/5 In 2020 I was involved in a paper that was submitted to multiple journals and rejected from all. It described an analysis of the early evolution of the virus in Wuhan, based on 125 SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences sampled at Zhongnan Hospital between Jan 2nd – Feb 8th 2020.
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I trust the FBI/DoE will add this to their evidence dossier. I have sent all the associated files and emails for what follows to a number of people including WHO/SAGO so that everything that follows can be verified.
1/14 In July 2022 163 bat CoV sequences from the WIV appeared on GenBank, including from bat virus RaTG13 (originally called Ra4991). ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nucleotide/MH6…. These relate to this paper from *2018* led by my former postdoc Jie Cui.
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