Wuhan seafood market may not be source of novel virus spreading globally
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
However, the Wuhan pathogen research laboratory is still a worthy source to consider relating to this virus. Accidents DO happen, and China has a history of making mistakes leading to dangerous pathogens escaping their labs.
In 2004, SARS escaped a BS-3 lab in Beijing, infecting several and killing at least one:
" In April 2004, China reported a case of SARS in a nurse who had cared for a researcher at the Chinese National Institute of Virology. While ill, the researcher had traveled twice by train from Beijing to Anhui province, where she was nursed by her mother, a physician, who fell ill and died. The nurse in turn infected five third-generation cases, causing no deaths.
Subsequent investigation uncovered three unrelated laboratory infections in different researchers at the NIV. At least of two primary patients had never worked with live SARS virus. Many shortcomings in biosecurity were found at the NIV, and the specific cause of the outbreak was traced to an inadequately inactivated preparation of SARS virus that was used in general (that is, not biosecure) laboratory areas, including one where the primary cases worked. It had not been tested to confirm its safety after inactivation, as it should have been."
https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/how-dangerous-viruses-c...
Were a lab accident the source of this outbreak, you can bet your last dollar that the CCP would go to extreme lengths to hide that fact.
The University later severed all ties with her and her crew.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/chinese-researcher-e...
The article speculates that this was related to IP theft of some kind, which seems strange considering the lab's work was all in the public domain--what's to steal?
This happened about six months ago, and four months before the Coronavirus broke. Is this at all related? Maybe, maybe not.
She (and her husband) are both Canadian researchers who happens to be Chinese. She shipped Ebola and henipavirus samples with "all appropriate precautions" as part of "routine" sharing program according to National Microbiology Laboratory. They suspended her non-salaried appointments during current investigation, her students, some of whom were Chinese nationals, were reassigned. The IP concern was a Chinese Mabworks company was developing the experimental and patented ebola drug ZMapp which she worked on without authorization.
* Some pretty heavy researchers in the US say that it (the virus) was not human-engineered. I find their reasoning spurious, but they know more than I do.
- "We" == "US Research Programs, funded by the Chinese, but not disclosed according to requirements given to them by the university or the federal grant authorities (whoever they might be for any given program)"
- "They" == "Whichever Chinese organizations, governmental or otherwise, that fund US researchers, and encourage them to 'under-the-table' provide results/data/samples"
EDIT: User pavelrub made a very reasonable comment on this thread that he was amazed at American's ability to conspiracy-monger (my words, not his, but he has since deleted his comment. I hope I am not taking too many liberties with his statement), but he's right. I have no basis (as I said up-thread) to believe any of this. Right now, I am hypothesis-hunting, and probably shouldn't share that mental-process in public, given that 99.9% of them (the broken hypotheses) will turn out to be trash.
I could relate to what you said about it’s a mental-process with maybe 99% trash, but there’s still 1% not trash in there and I can only know it isn’t trash by not getting carried away without verifying the hypothesis in first place.
Lesson learned: sure, go ahead with hypothesis hunting, but also spend time to verify them first.
Edit: more simply, be careful about confirmation bias.
I'd love to read more. Do you have a link?
EDIT: Because it was me hypothecating (generating hypotheses), it will be more than one link that may turn out to be unrelated.
Besides, we're moving into a weekend; This is the time for clearing off decks.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/harvard-university-professor-...
"The Department of Justice announced today that the Chair of Harvard University’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department and two Chinese nationals have been charged in connection with aiding the People’s Republic of China."
...
"Unbeknownst to Harvard University beginning in 2011, Lieber became a “Strategic Scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China and was a contractual participant in China’s Thousand Talents Plan from in or about 2012 to 2017. China’s Thousand Talents Plan is one of the most prominent Chinese Talent recruit plans that are designed to attract, recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security."
He was Chair of the Chem department at Harvard, respected key opinion leader etc. All he did was take money from more sources than he disclosed, to fund the normal business of his academic career. Reading between the lines, looking at the photos, everyone familiar with science+academia can clearly see he's slimy but no more slimy than many other respected businesspeople. But to lay people it seems like a scientist is getting persecuted for furthering international cooperation in basic research. And of course one does not chair a Harvard department without powerful friends.
From the court filings, it seems Lieber was caught a long time ago when he e.g. explicitly lied about funding sources to investigators.
When coronavirus happened, suddenly Wuhan, China, and research became politically exposed. Before coronavirus, if you said Lieber took money to help develop a university in Wuhan people in the USA would think he was doing charity work in some unknown tier 3 city. Now people in the USA hear the same and think of advanced bioweapons. It's a good time to indict and convict.
Discussed in another thread last wek
How about the idea that this is an engineered virus unwittingly unleashed on the world by some accident/incompetence?
If one reads the history of nuclear weapons/reactors, and how all kinds of BS, negligence, incompetence, has only by miracle spared us from major catastrophe at various times, one would consider what might happen with all those military virus labs...
Anyway, there's no evidence so far to support any of these theories, but considering China's record I guess it wouldn't surprise me. For now I still think the easiest explanation is the most likely.
To claim that this came from a lab certain requires more evidence than its mere existence. The whole RNA sequence is available online and so far no expert to my knowledge has claimed it looks synthetic.
It’s being closely tracked and any claims should not be made without genome.
You can see they are closely related, at about 88% sequence identity. There are point mutations spread more or less evenly over the entire genome. This is how evolution works on genomes, and basically rules out genetic engineering, since researchers would perform specific localized changes to specific proteins, or contiguous insertions of genetic material from evolutionarily distant sources.
Source: Go over to NCBI and do the alignment yourself, also am PhD biologist.
PS: The amount of pseudoscience being peddled for attention or thrills in these threads is getting really worrying to me, I had expected something totally different from this community. :/
I believe this is generally the case with most topics outside the standard focus of this site (which I would posit is computers generally). There tends to be a mixture of intelligent, accurate commentary, and intelligent but misled commentary (and my observers bias would further distort the separation between those two categories). It tends to get better as discussion continues, but not always.
That said, this topic is more likely to be sensationalized than most.
But one of my favourite things about HN is the rebuttals, deep-dives, and 'well, actually's of informed commenters discussing niches I know little about.
But yeah, wrong answers are more informative.
> PS: The amount of pseudoscience being peddled for attention or thrills in these threads is getting really worrying to me, I had expected something totally different from this community. :/
On the flip side, I've seen lots of "experts" chime in and say things that prove to be wrong. For example, during the early stages of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, I recall reading comments by lots of "experts" explaining how there's little to worry about and they referred to things like core catchers and all the other mechanisms that are supposed to protect a (modern) nuclear power plant in emergency. As is evident, much of their expertise did not apply and things that weren't supposed to go wrong went wrong.
I don't remember specific cases but I'm pretty sure I've witnessed a similar pattern over and over again here, and just seeing news of coronavirus outbreak immediately brought back memory of -- and prediction of -- experts chiming in telling people why it's nothing to be concerned about and why all the pop news scare is overblown. I'm getting kind of a dejavu feeling here.
If you go back and read about any newsworthy event there are experts getting it wrong.
That's because a reality like Michael Crichton's novels is fun to imagine, albeit...fictional.
Honest question: if this is common knowledge of people in the field, why wouldn't people genetically engineering a virus (and trying to hide it) do so in a fashion to make it look more like evolution in the genomes? Is that not possible to do?
How can you say this as fact when we don't even know the morbidity rate of the coronavirus? The story isn't over yet, but it looks like it could be twice as deadly as influenza.
On top of that, there's no reason to do it for a military weapon. For military use you don't infect a few people and hope it spreads, you infect a whole bunch and hope the whole thing spreads quickly enough that the virus can't be stopped, and it overwhelms an entire population by incapacitating or killing them.
Dispersing virus over a significant fraction of a population isn't easy or quiet, so whether it's a natural disease or GMO doesn't matter, because they'll know who did it.
The only scenario in which it makes sense to evolve a genetically engineered weapon in a way that hides its origins is for bioterrorism... and bioterrorism is very rare because it's a lot harder technically than terrorism that consists of shooting up a military base or running an exploding motorboat into a ship.
HN is good when it comes to technology, and that's what I browse it for. When it comes to genetics or biology...not so much. Engineer's disease runs definitely stronger than coronaviruses here.
It's worth rebutting. The nonsense is a little out of control.
Anyways, i just searched for russian bio lab accident and this came up first: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/decades-after-deadly...
I'm sure there is more to find about that, but for the purpose of rebutting your nonsense i deem it sufficient.
What do i mean by that? The theories aren't unfounded when looking back, because they happened! It doesn't really matter where, when, by whom, and what exactly. Just that it did happen multiple times.
Cheers.
edit: Well, it even has a wikipedia article if you prefer that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak
It's not out of the realm of possibility and shouldn't be disregarded out of hand like it has been. Could be from there or maybe not. We really need more information from China to settle some of these discussions.
So the same guy that claimed ISIS have biological weapon? Other than public information, so what does he know that others don’t? this guy has no credibility to begin with.
There is going to be an (X) in Wuhan for any value of (X) anyone cares to name. The fog of uncertainty is still thick; nobody has much of an idea what is going on. Anyone claiming that they have a theory on where the virus came from is fantasising. The knee-jerk people probably don't want them drowning out a weak signal with useless noise.
It is possible; but a lot of things are possible. It is a mighty leap from a starting point of basically no primary evidence and all the people who have on-the-ground access to evidence are very busy managing a rapidly growing crisis.
It is important to remember that there is zero evidence of this theory, and yet despite that it is spreading through the Internet populace faster than the virus itself.
I mean by this measure any time someone crashes a car it could be an assassination attempt. It's happened before.
What rubs me the wrong way are the people instantly dismissing something like this as unlikely, or even impossible ignoring history.
The amount of novel virus to have emerged from labs so far is probably very close to, if not zero.
https://www.businessinsider.com/military-government-secret-e...
For the article and the pushback, see this link and its comments:
"Our analysis of the spike glycoprotein of 2019-nCoV revealed several interesting findings: First, we identified 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike glycoprotein that are not present in any other coronavirus reported till date. To our surprise, all the 4 inserts in the 2019-nCoV mapped to It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license. preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. bioRxiv preprint first posted online Jan. 31, 2020; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871. The copyright holder for this short segments of amino acids in the HIV-1 gp120 and Gag among all annotated virus proteins in the NCBI database. This uncanny similarity of novel inserts in the 2019- nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag is unlikely to be fortuitous."
https://mobile.twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/122330594672370...
This is no longer true. See:
'Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag'
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1
These are findings from IIT researchers who have found "uncanny" similarities between nCov and HIV which could increase virality.
See these threads:
https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1223337991168380928
https://twitter.com/bblarsen1/status/1223343688400527360
Seems the entire publish and peer-review cycle occurs on the scale of hours or days now, lol.
True, it's no single expert. It's experts. The HIV-1 insertions, made at functional points, are reasonably suspicious and worthy of further analysis.
Quote: 75 815 individuals have been infected in Wuhan as of Jan 25, 2020. The epidemic doubling time was 6·4 days. We estimated that if there was no reduction in transmissibility, the Wuhan epidemic would peak around April, 2020, and local epidemics across cities in mainland China would lag by 1–2 weeks.
Any comments on the soundness of the methodology used?
How do they know, when its know that the virus can be spread before symptoms kick in? (https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/31/health/coronavirus-asympt...)
What's the original source for the "Wuhan seafood market" hypothesis?
It seems in the avian flu they had established very early on the lineage of it. It seems very unlikely that they will not be able to identify patient zero.
There was a very far out article on zerohedge (not making any claims as to the legitimacy of the article or the publication) which had some interesting references about recent coronavirus research in facilities outside of China. I wouldn't normally promote it but there are some interesting references in there. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/did-china-steal-coron...
https://www.wired.com/story/wuhan-coronavirus-snake-flu-theo...
Don't know if the science is solid, but given how riddled bats are with all kinds of nasty stuff, you probably don't want to be eating that unless you're particularly keen on developing an exotic disease.
this outbreak proves humans are doomed to repeat the same mistake
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavi...
If you're interested in the open speculation, this guy does a pretty good breakdown of all the talking points:
“The initial focus of case detection was on patients with pneumonia, but we now understand that some patients can present with gastrointestinal symptoms,"
What might seem like a rising concern is that there's documentation that the new virus may have made two hops between healthy carriers and infected others.
It seems like maybe all 2019-nCoV posts are getting penalized by mod(s) silently? Because this one and the last one an hour ago are. [0]
I am not making any statements about whether that is sensible or not - but why not comment on why, like you've so often done in other cases?
We hit on the "significant new information" test after the Snowden storm of 2013, when users justly complained that the front page had become inundated with too many articles that added nothing substantial and were just triggering repeat threads. As a discussion becomes repetitive, it also tends to become wilder and more flame-prone—as if the mind has to resort to that to amuse itself, since there's nothing new to sink its teeth into.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Since HN's organizing value is intellectual curiosity, repetition and groundless speculation are among the things most to be avoided here. That's why we moderate that way.
https://medium.com/@siradrianbond/coronavirus-2019-ncov-part...
If that's (kind of) on purpose that's really weird, to suspend somebodies account but leave the article up and remove all the author references. Anybody from medium on hn :)?
The funny thing about that is when you go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Institute_of_Virology the geocoordinates there lead you into the same forest on all major mapping services, while the pictures are recent or even from this year.
Interesting edit history, 'patriots' proudly performing Psyberwar...
It's probably one of the adjacent buildings.
Looks like it’s in both places but wasn’t “moved” like in that link
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-7922379/Chinas-la...
https://www.nature.com/news/inside-the-chinese-lab-poised-to...
s/biolab/Apollo/
‘Number of suspicious elements’
Even the VOA has came out to classify this as a hoax. Sometimes people just want to believe in conspiracies.
And the mechanism is far less far-fetched, considering that on at least one instance SARS was confirmed as having escaped a research lab much like the one in question.
I’ll believe it when NIH or CDC publish corroborating evidence. Or are they part of the ‘system’ to you?
For example, I definitely trust CDC (the US one). However, I am vary of trusting Chinese authorities and agencies when it comes to this issue, as they have shown before that they are willing to go to extreme lengths to hide the truth when revealing it casts a bad light or reveals some info. I have no strong opinion on the true source of the virus, as there isn't simply enough info and time to do a proper investigation by CDC, but it is easily imaginable how much the reputation of China will get damaged if it gets discovered that the virus was born out of one of their labs.
If that's all real, then why couldn't they land on the moon?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt
Their point being to cross the Belts in tin cans even going fast would have toasted them nicely and afterwards being toasted further by having no protection from cosmic rays or solar winds at all.
Which won't happen if you stay in LEO where every human space flight happened afterwards.
To return back to the current topic, there was a (good!) movie about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One from 1978 where they faked it to proactively saving face in case of any real mishaps. Though that was for traveling to Mars, not the Moon.
There's a bio lab there studying Coronaviruses, industrial accidents happen all the time, it's not hard to believe.
Blatantly calling out such an accident with government departments probably wouldn't bode well for relations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentat...
I quote/translate: "In the course of these fifteen years, China has several times failed to live up to their engagement, staying relatively vague about the existence of an offensive biological program. Chinese officials had, for example, previously certified they had no other P4 and no plans to build any, but we now know they do have many, some being quite suspicious, a France official said".
The book is "France-Chine, les liaisons dangereuses" by Antoine Izambard, for those curious.
We had incidents where there were system failures eg. Air filtration.
It can just be a simple accident that the China government is covering up because they know their population would turn on them.
- Most high-end virology labs are doing research on human to human transmission of corona viruses. They're a major emerging type of virus we don't understand, and a Chinese lab working on them is even less surprising.
- If this was a bioweapon, it sucks.
Like, can you spin the theory that we're missing them? Sure. But there's a pretty strong absence of evidence there, despite a field that's actively looking constantly (and where showing that would further the political and scientific careers of a number of people).
Bioweapons aren't all that effective in general for the reasons seen here: they're too slowly acting, to easy to treat, and not as lethal as, say, chemical weapons (which are also not that effective as weapons). Biological weapons are most dangerous as terror weapons.
I hate to say anything more, because we would easily move into wild speculation territory.
But this was mostly to address the terminal version of this particular rumor, which I've also encountered on social media.
What also leads me to believe this may be the case is that there was (according to the article) experiments on bats being run, and in China, people often find random animals, in drainage ditches, etc., and then go on to sell them for meat. It's possible that the bats they were working on were improperly disposed of, and then picked up and sold at the wet market.
No coronavirus was sent to Wuhan from that lab, it was a henipavirus and Ebola. It also wasn't sent by Dr. Qiu.
That doesn't prove the coronavirus didn't escape from the Wuhan lab. But it does debunk this popular theory that it was Dr Qiu.
Even if it did escape from the lab, it doesn't mean it's a bioweapon. Although the CCP are almost certainly working on them, possibly in their only known level 4 lab in Wuhan. I imagine there is a research overlap between bioweapons and treating people. They both require a deep understanding of how the viruses function.
There is an interesting unanswered question: what is the RCMP investigating Dr. Qiu for? They are very vague. It could be nothing, or it could be related to her helping setup the lab in Wuhan. The RCMP is a vain, inept organization IMO.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/china-coronavirus-on...
> Or at least start with an email: Dr Peng can be reached at [...], and his phone# is [...]
Have they no shame? They've found a bat immunologist (a different one than the virologist in the Medium post upstream; it's almost as if there are many experts on bat viruses), strongly suggest that this makes him the one responsible, and then ask people to contact him? This is basically orchestrating a harassment campaign. I hope they can be sued for that (defamation? IANAL).
“BOSTON (CBS) – Three people tied to universities and a hospital in the Boston area were indicted on charges they lied about their ties to China or tried to help the Chinese government. Among them was Dr. Charles Lieber, the chair of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology.
Prosecutors said Lieber had a contract with Wuhan Institute of Technology. He also ran a group that had contracts with the Department of Defense and National Institutes of Health” [2]
[1] https://twitter.com/ARanganathan72/status/122332087916298649...
[2] https://boston.cbslocal.com/2020/01/28/massachusetts-china-i...
I’ll believe it when NIH or CDC publish corroborating evidence.
Hmm...
Although your content seems very fatalistic ( = we can't understand nature). It seems weird and suspicious
No. From a new, anonymous account where I intend to post my opinions without them being tied to my identity. At least until I post enough for stylometric analysis to work...
But let’s try to think this through.
If they (China) were researching it, then it is possible that this could’ve accidentally escaped the lab. Although that is some serious professional incompetence. And if they are intelligent and skilled enough to work with dangerous diseases, then I’m sure they have proper containment and stringent decontamination processes in place.
However, if this was a bioweapon, then a few arguments fall apart.
(1) If they engineered it, then they should’ve had the genome already. Instead, they had to capture the strain, and sequence its genome, and it took them three weeks to complete the sequencing. And then, they shared it with the world, the CDC, the WHO, in order to help foreign countries contain it.
For comparison, the CDC took over 2 months to sequence the Ebola virus. The Chinese sequenced this virus in 3 weeks. Granted, technology and techniques improved in the intervening years.
So that begs the question: If this was a bioweapon, then why would they quickly share its genome with the world? Why not just keep it for themselves, while they work out some cure, and let the rest of the world flounder and die off?
Their strength comes from their economic engine, and their exports to the world. They can’t make things for foreign markets, if those other countries are dying from some bioweapon that was unleashed on the world.
(2) If this was a bioweapon, and then they ‘accidentally’ released it on themselves, which makes no sense, then what is the goal? Because the economic fallout from this thing will cause billions in economic damages. As well as potentially causing social instability, for a country that prizes stability over all else. And the political fallout will be even higher.
(3) The Chinese are not suicidal. They were attacked with biological and chemical warfare by the Japanese in the 1930s. They were threatened with nuclear annihilation by MacArthur (to drop 50 atomic bombs) during the Korean War in the 1950s, and were also likely subjected to biological warfare too. The rest of the Western world prefers to ignore this, but they can never forget, because their people actually died from biological warfare.
So given all that, they have first hand experience of what biological warfare will do. So if they are researching bioweapons, then I’m pretty certain that they will have stringent procedures in place to contain it.
(4) And then there is the most logical argument, that this is a very poor bioweapon.
The goal of a bioweapon is to maximize immediate casualties, while minimizing uncontrollable transmissions to others. Basically, there is no point in using a weapon, if it ends up killing yourself.
I would love to hear more about this "well funded" campaign to smear China's reputation. Are conspiracies only "far-fetched" when the don't align with your beliefs?
Following Hanlon's Razor, never assume malice when stupidity will suffice. IF, and that's a big if, this virus was somehow bio-engineered, the most probable explanation is that it escaped from the adjacent lab due to humans making mistakes. Now what do you do in that situation? A virus you're legitimately researching escapes from a state sponsored lab. You try to cover it up, of course, which isn't even hard because it might have developed in nearby bats anyway. That way, nobody looses their face and you can try to fight the virus with everyone else.
That is an easier and more logical explanation than some "bioweapon".
https://biorxiv-cache.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/2020.01.30....
> [ABSTRACT] We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses. Importantly, amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag. Interestingly, despite the inserts being discontinuous on the primary amino acid sequence, 3D-modelling of the 2019-nCoV suggests that they converge to constitute the receptor binding site. The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have identity /similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature. This work provides yet unknown insights on 2019-nCoV and sheds light on the evolution and pathogenicity of this virus with important implications for diagnosis of this virus.
=====
This study is crap.
My comment from another thread. This paper isn't peer reviewed or published. It's just an online journal.
I've worked pretty closely with gag in my PhD thesis. Gag is the conglomerate protein that gets cut by the protease to generate the hiv capsid, matrix, and carrier proteins. Gp120 is the receptor protein.
This is a really fucking dumb study and these scientists should be ashamed. Those amino acids are so short. They just went and looked for a virus to match. You can go and blast the amino acids yourself. Just copy and paste from the journal entry into NCBIs BLASTp. I did it and there's hundreds of matches to those sequences. HIV didn't even come up in the first 100. The 4th residue is missing like 6 amino acids. There are conserved regions in viruses. Their "gp120" match compares 6 amino acids out of 850 in the whole protein for example.
They found 4 sections that were in the new virus but not SARS. They then took these differences and ran them against all known viral proteins. They only looked at proteins with 100% matches, but if you look at the table they didn't match 100% for alignment. So like one is ABCEFG and they match it to an HIV protein that is ABCXYZEFG and they are calling those total matches. There's also tons of viruses that match these tiny sequences, they just noticed all 4 have HIV matches so they ignore the other matches and only looked at HIV.
Go blast it yourself if you want.
[HIV] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_genome_of_HIV
[gp120] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gp120
Table 1 shows four alignments. The first two are only six contiguous residues, so can easily happen by chance. Three has multiple mistmatches as well as the gap (red). Four has an even larger gap to get the alignment.
Take any two viruses and there's a decent likelihood of finding similar alignments.
- Some layman.
The PDF itself is MS Word, has numerous typos/little care (words like 'alingment'), random font changes back and forth between Times New Roman and the default MS Word font (Calibri?))
For HIV related fearmongering about "well, why would they know to treat it with HIV meds??", people are looking at this already because previous SARS-CoV has previous investigation with HIV medication, it is not unique to nCOV: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14985565, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15144898, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14519691 - these are from 2003-2006.
Great and informative article unlike my comment
Case in point: the plague. Still very much alive in some areas of Asia and Africa, and localized outbreaks still occur today. But displacement of carriers species (e.g. rats) from those areas to others due to various climate-shift-induced pressures (such as too much or too little food, or human intrusion) can trigger outbreaks far and wide. The original plague period and spread was in many ways a perfect storm of factors but a re-occurrence is feasible (albeit today's improved knowledge of the cause, hygiene and containment measures should prevent it reaching anything like the scale once seen).
Another example: A few years back Myrtle Rust made its way over to NZ for the first recorded time, and one theory of how it got here was being carried on unusually warm/humid air currents from Australia which allowed it, as a kind of mold, to survive the journey.
Another vector: Melting permafrost releasing preserved pathogens to which today's populations (human and otherwise) have no immunity is another 'fun' climate change scenario. I find that one less plausible mostly because it would require human intrusion or some other means of transmission from the thawing site to hosts. But eh, maybe.
We really need to upvote this old racist meme?
It's from poor people. Poor people who live amongst wild animals. Aka farmers. It came from a rural location. Ie from a bat shitting on their rice while it dries.
Does noone get what the meme about lightning deaths reducing each year means? It's about with wealth, nature has less of a catastrophic effect on our lives in part because people move to cities.