Could SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind COVID-19, have leaked from a lab? It’s a complicated story of science, ethics, not-quite-smoking guns and bat caves-so I wanted to take a look at the genetic evidence, by printing out covid’s genetic code.
Video chapters
00:00 Introduction
02:38 Enter the variants
04:57 The Wuhan Institute of Virology
06:39 1. A natural virus escapes (RaTG13 and the Mojiang mine)
09:30 2. ‘Gain of function’ research (how to make a ferret sneeze)
11:23 3. An engineered virus (splicing SARS-1 for fun and profit)
14:07 Covid’s family tree
Sources and further reading
The lab leak hypothesis
Update 01/2023: There’s now an increasingly strong preponderance of evidence (albeit frustratingly not conclusive) that covid originated naturally at the Huanan Seafood Market. Two back-to-back papers gave the evidence for this in July 2022, and the evidence is laid out in this excellent thread on Twitter: / 1551937826580824070
An even-handed case for the prosecution for the lab leak hypothesis www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/op...
The deleted coronavirus sequences from early in the pandemic www.nature.com/articles/d4158...
Open letter from researchers calling for an investigation into covid’s origins science.sciencemag.org/conten...
RaTG13 and the Mojiang mine
Discovery of RaTG13 in a mineshaft by WIV researchers link.springer.com/article/10....
Comparing SARS-CoV-2 to RaTG13 www.nature.com/articles/s4158...
The mysterious miners’ pneumonia www.reuters.com/business/heal... and www.frontiersin.org/articles/...
Gain of function research
This is a great article on WIV’s gain of function research, and the history and risks of this kind of work in general www.technologyreview.com/2021...
It relates to this 2015 paper www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985
And here is a letter expressing concerns about the work: www.nature.com/articles/natur...
Other interesting stuff
Paper about the N501Y substitution www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti...
The UK’s incredible coronavirus genome sequencing www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-...
How smallpox claimed its final victim www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england...
A (rather unnerving and almost certainly incomplete) list of lab leaks in the past en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
Data
SARS-CoV-2.0 genome www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/...
SARS-CoV-2 Alpha variant definition covariants.org/variants/20I.A... and cov-lineages.org/global_repor...
SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant definition covariants.org/variants/21A.D... and cov-lineages.org/global_repor...
SARS-CoV-1 genome www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/...
SARS-1 phylogenetic ‘family tree’ adapted from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_...
Images
The lab I’m ‘sitting in’ is adapted from this image by the National Cancer Institute. As far as I know, it has nothing to do with coronaviruses! But those are real sequencing machines… Thank you, as ever, to the US for making all its taxpayer-funded photos copyright-free! unsplash.com/photos/oCLuFi9GYNA
During the end screen, my laptop is running Nextclade, which is absolutely mind-boggling. You can provide it with loads of coronavirus sequences, and it will fire up a multithreaded alignment algorithm right in your web browser to tell you which variant they each are, along with interesting information about their mutations. Truly we live in the future when tech like this is available for free. clades.nextstrain.org/
Pedantic PPE note
What I’m wearing in the thumbnail isn’t good PPE practice! Firstly, where are my googles?! Secondly, to get a proper seal with an FFP3/N95 mask, you need to be clean-shaven, which I’m not! Finally, this obviously isn’t appropriate for, eg, a BSL-4 lab… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafe...
Credits
Many thanks to Tran Nguyen for her help with this video!
And finally…
Follow me on Twitter: / statto
Follow me on Instagram: / andrewjsteele
Like my page on Facebook: / drandrewsteele
Read my book, Ageless ageless.link/
Негізгі бет Ғылым және технология The coronavirus lab leak conspiracy
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