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Comment by Uberphallus | Hacker News Reader

Actually, after going through the paper, most concerns seem to me like cherry picked data, except for the fact that Shi theoretically found the RaTG13 (the "origin" of SARS-CoV-2) in 2013.

Even though it displayed potential for human infection and literally her job was to analyse bat coronaviruses with human infection potential, the virus was shelved for 7 years, and there's NO scientific literature, produced by her or otherwise, about this virus.

Not until the pandemic arrived, at least, then she's the first to say "nCoV-2019 actually comes from the bat coronavirus RaTG13, look how similar they are, it's zoonotic, teeheehee".

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Not that shocking. After nCoV-2019 was sequenced, the first thing they would do is compare it to all previously sequenced virus samples.

The shocking part is that her lab never published that sequence contrary, to my knowledge, to common practice. Also the little research associated to it.

Let's gloss over the whole thing:

1- In 2012 6 mine workers get infected with a SARS-like disease, test positive for SARS-specific antibodies, 3 die.

2- Shi is literally sent to that cave to research the bat coronaviruses there that might have had caused the illness.

3- Her team finds a plethora of viral samples of potentially zoonotic diseases.

4- Her team describes generic findings, no full sequences published whatsoever, no mention of the actual reason that motivated the study of that shaft.

Fast forward to 2020

5- SARS-like disease arises, sequence matches 96% with one that potentially killed 3 miners that somehow wasn't really researched past basic findings.

How true is this? I was under the impression that all of the coronaviruses were published in a public repository even before the outbreak started.

It was only published along with her paper.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MN996532 (2020)

Some quick google fu shows no hits before her paper, either for the virus name (RaTG13) or for chains of nucleotides.

Then another point that seems suspicious to me is that, in her interview with Nature, she states that RaTG13 was only found in 1 (one) bat poop sample, as in, ever, and that all of the sample was used, so there's no virus isolate available, which is too convenient.

Edit:

It was previously called RaBtCoV/4991, and only a single gene was published in 2016.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/983856042

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