Friday, September 18, 2020

Washington Post/CIA tries to take down Li-meng Yan with a Single Batch of Smuggled Pangolins

 So a WaPo op-ed that no one is supposed to question (kind of like CIA drug smuggling through assets)...

cites this study in Nature...

 I had not read that particular article but I did read the studies it cites...

 So the issue here is the claim about the Pangolins.

Li-Meng Yan is citing no corroboration thus far of the Pangolins with identified contamination as the likely source for the Pangolin ACE-2 claim.

The Pan-SL-CoV/GD sequences may be from contamination.

https://zenodo.org/record/3885333#.X2TwRItOlPY 

So there is the claim promoted by WaPo.

The SARS-CoV-2-like virus found in captive pangolins from Guangdong should be better sequenced

So essentially there was one shipment of smuggled pangolins showing this ACE-2 human connection...

 raising the possibility that the five pangolins seized in Guangdong in March 2019 were infected by the same virus strain, most probably during their captivity.

I found the genome assemblies of GD/P virus of poor quality, having high levels of missing data. Additionally, unexpected reads in the Illumina sequencing data were identified. The GD/P2S dataset2 contains reads that are identical to SARS-CoV-2, suggesting either the coexistence of two SARS-CoV-2-like viruses in the same pangolin or contamination by the human virus. In the four other GD/P datasets1 many mitochondrial reads from pangolin were identified, as well as from three other species, namely, human, mouse and tiger.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.07.184374v1.full.pdf

 all of the published pangolin CoV genome sequences that share a nearly identical Spike receptor binding domain with SARS-CoV-2 originate from this single batch of smuggled pangolins. This raises the question of whether pangolins are truly reservoirs or hosts of SARS-CoV-2-related coronaviruses in the wild, or whether the pangolins may have contracted the CoV from another host species during trafficking.
















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