Between SARS-1 and 2, teams of scientists scoured China and South-East Asia for bat viruses which might have human pandemic potential. Only two groups found any: WIV, and the PLA.
But the rest were loaded when the original paper was changed from an immune evading ORF8 based experiment on SARSr data to an evolutionary paper…the bioinformatics are very exact here 25-OCT-2019 was when this data was loaded.
The rest is propaganda…including the paper we are not allowed to read.
But there is a jump in data and GI number to the rest of the Yu2018 data set there after the ORF8 nucleotides and their original detailed protein submissions.
Simon Wain-Hobson recently brought up the fact that there's an order of magnitude more SAR1-like sequences than SARS2 like ones. I actually hadn't really grokked that there were hundreds of the former.
He seemed to favor the explanation that the samples and sequences might exist, but people won't publish them because of what might be inferred from that data.
I dunno. That explanation doesn't seem to fit with the table you have above.
Up until 2020 no-one had published any. Then there was a brief flurry of discoveries in 2020-22 in South-East Asia. In 2021 China's Institute of Pathogen Biology (CAMS) conducted a huge survey of ~17,000 bats and announced 0 SARS-CoV-2rs remaining in China.
China's propaganda changed. They now acknowledged SARS-CoV-2 may have been engineered, the inference being it was likely done by US scientists. The leaked DEFUSE proposal, the Banal pre-print and sequences and the Chinese survey pre-print all dropped within a day of each other.
Actually, the more I think about this the more plausible SWH's reasoning becomes.
The only reason SARS2 is a column in your table is because there was a global pandemic resulting from that virus. If the WIV had only published a single scrap of a genome in this clade, why would the other investigators have published much similar data either? There very well could be samples in collected by HKU or Pasteur before 2020, and people have absolutely no interest in finding out what's in them...
Most sequences generated are only RdRp. They would only go to the trouble of trying to sequence a full genome perhaps if the RdRP looked different and novel, or very similar to SARS. Even if there were no SARS-CoV-2r complete sequences before 2020 you'd expect there to be RdRps that had been routinely obtained.
The counts I put in the table are only SARS-related coronaviruses, but there are also many more alphacoronaviruses (most common), many other betacoronaviruses (HKU9 related, HKU4 related etc). This huge effort failed to identify even a single SARS-CoV-2 related RdRp.
But Pasteur were able to find five in the first cave they walked into. So perhaps Wain-Hobson should ask his own people what their secret is?
Some of the details in here I did not know and are really interesting. Thanks!
Free thinking is not undisciplined.
Thank you for collecting and sharing these thoughts.
Keep up this great work.
https://biosafetynow.substack.com/p/gobbledygook/comment/172303352?r=9kr7t&utm_medium=ios
Just a bioinformatic note on Yu2018
The original ORF8 experiments were loaded in 2018…
https://web.archive.org/web/20220809085043/https:/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/?term=Spread+and+Geographic+Structure+of+SARS-related+Coronaviruses+in+++++++++++++Bats+and+the+Origin+of+Human+SARS+Coronavirus
But the rest were loaded when the original paper was changed from an immune evading ORF8 based experiment on SARSr data to an evolutionary paper…the bioinformatics are very exact here 25-OCT-2019 was when this data was loaded.
The rest is propaganda…including the paper we are not allowed to read.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230308013429/https://twitter.com/EdwardCHolmes
And the self refuting denials
https://theconversation.com/how-conspiracy-theories-about-covids-origins-are-hampering-our-ability-to-prevent-the-next-pandemic-261475
This all means that CSIRO and USyd have more details to share…
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1006698&type=printable
Sorry, which data was loaded on 25-OCT-2019?
The Yu2018 data here was loaded on 25-OCT-2019, we know this due to bracketing techniques and dumb luck.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220809085043/https:/www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/?term=Spread+and+Geographic+Structure+of+SARS-related+Coronaviruses+in+++++++++++++Bats+and+the+Origin+of+Human+SARS+Coronavirus
The series starts with
MH615800 which is the RaTG15 ORF8 end of the Yu2018 series…these are the original experiments in 2018 with dual use immune evasion explored.
With earlier GI: 1430929737 timestamped to 2018.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MH615800
But there is a jump in data and GI number to the rest of the Yu2018 data set there after the ORF8 nucleotides and their original detailed protein submissions.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MH615808
Also
Notice the gap in the GI number here…
With the series ending at the Oct 2019 time stamped GI
GI: 1769824623
https://web.archive.org/web/20250118004510/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MH615977.1?report=genbank
Then finally there is the luck of the interruption in the Yu2018 which helps capture exactly when it was laid down in the GenBank database.
GI: 1769824591
25-OCT-2019 the date that is my current evidence point for lab incident and resultant GenBank data set manipulation until proven otherwise.
Basic deductive methods analysis.
Trust but Verify approach.
Yu2018 fails verification level scrutiny.
Thanks - I'll look into it.
Simon Wain-Hobson recently brought up the fact that there's an order of magnitude more SAR1-like sequences than SARS2 like ones. I actually hadn't really grokked that there were hundreds of the former.
He seemed to favor the explanation that the samples and sequences might exist, but people won't publish them because of what might be inferred from that data.
I dunno. That explanation doesn't seem to fit with the table you have above.
Up until 2020 no-one had published any. Then there was a brief flurry of discoveries in 2020-22 in South-East Asia. In 2021 China's Institute of Pathogen Biology (CAMS) conducted a huge survey of ~17,000 bats and announced 0 SARS-CoV-2rs remaining in China.
China's propaganda changed. They now acknowledged SARS-CoV-2 may have been engineered, the inference being it was likely done by US scientists. The leaked DEFUSE proposal, the Banal pre-print and sequences and the Chinese survey pre-print all dropped within a day of each other.
https://www.science.org/content/article/pandemic-start-anywhere-but-here-argue-papers-chinese-scientists-echoing-party-line
Actually, the more I think about this the more plausible SWH's reasoning becomes.
The only reason SARS2 is a column in your table is because there was a global pandemic resulting from that virus. If the WIV had only published a single scrap of a genome in this clade, why would the other investigators have published much similar data either? There very well could be samples in collected by HKU or Pasteur before 2020, and people have absolutely no interest in finding out what's in them...
Most sequences generated are only RdRp. They would only go to the trouble of trying to sequence a full genome perhaps if the RdRP looked different and novel, or very similar to SARS. Even if there were no SARS-CoV-2r complete sequences before 2020 you'd expect there to be RdRps that had been routinely obtained.
The counts I put in the table are only SARS-related coronaviruses, but there are also many more alphacoronaviruses (most common), many other betacoronaviruses (HKU9 related, HKU4 related etc). This huge effort failed to identify even a single SARS-CoV-2 related RdRp.
But Pasteur were able to find five in the first cave they walked into. So perhaps Wain-Hobson should ask his own people what their secret is?