Slides describing the nature of Corona Chan. Better than average chance it's CRISPR edited.
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I've been extremely reluctant to weigh in on this and still don't want anyone to take my opinions too seriously because I'm just riffing. It's been unbelievable to me that China would use something so chaotic and unpredictable as a weapon (experiment gone wrong would maybe seems more believable?), but so many things seem so weird about this virus.
Not familiar with the specific SARS virus genes, but fuck, if this person actually used the given sequence and didn't just mess with the input to troll tinfoils on the internet, that insertion is wild. Going to go check it out for myself & will update later. For anyone interested, the WuFlu sequence is
here. I remember the other day a scientist said that it looked like the Wuhan virus had almost the same reservoir as the SARS virus, which seemed suspicious because using a phylogenetic tree tool shows that the SARS-like bat virus didn't descend from SARS, the two viruses descended from a common ancestor. Assuming that the SARS-like bat virus wasn't transmissible to humans (which is a reasonable "if" to be fair), the virus would have had to recreate the same feature analogously. Interested to see more data on that. Is there a discord or group chat for computational biology nerds looking at this stuff?
Going to stress again the thing I've been concerned about the past few days. Despite this new virus appearing to have strong homology with the SARS-like bat coronavirus (like 95% iirc),
bats aren't around in China at this time of the year. They're all hibernating. So this could
not have come from eating bat. That's why the "snake" theory came about, but if you read the actual paper it's just bunk science. Not to mention it'd be unprecedented for it to be so generalized that it could quickly jump to reptiles from a mammal. Maybe it did come from some mammal that had come into close contact with bats, but we have no real informed guess on that, and I suspect you'd see more mutation if it switched to an animal that wasn't a bat species or closely related to bats, right? Bats are actually pretty closely related to primates, so that jump is a bit easier to make.