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X-post from TheDonald: A plain English breakdown of Dr. Li-Meng Yan's China Virus paper for the non-science inclined
posted ago by Scroon ago by Scroon +45 / -0

For reference, The Donald thread is here.

Link to Dr. Li-Meng Yan's paper:

https://zenodo.org/record/4028830#.X1_G1mhKg2z

And here's the ELI(15) translation of the main points of the paper.

The genomes for COVID-19 and the coronaviruses ZC45 and ZCX21 are very similar

  1. COVID-19 (technically named, SARS-CoV-2) is a coronavirus. If you look at the NCBI database that shows the gene sequences of other coronavirus, it closely matches two related coronaviruses known as ZC45 and ZXC21. (Those particular viruses also happened to be discovered by Chinese researches in 2015.)

  2. Other bat-type coronaviruses are similar to COVID-19, but they come in at about 89% identical over the entire genome. ZC45/ZCX21, however, are in the range of 94%-100% identical to COVID-19, depending on the section you're looking at.

Like really, really, unusually similar...

  1. There are two particularly interesting gene sequences to look at in COVID-19 and ZC45 (and ZXC21). They are the sections that code for the Orf8 protein and E protein...

  2. Orf8 exists in other coronaviruses, but the sequence will vary a lot between different types. If you look at all other coronaviruses, their Orf8 sequences match COVID-19 with a 58% correspondence. However, ZC45 matches COVID-19's Orf18 with a 94.2% correspondence. This is weird, because all the other data suggest that Orf8 is a sequence that just plays loosey-goosey between strains, but here we have an unnaturally close identicality. It's like catching two students cheating on a test because their written answers are so similarly worded.

  3. As for the E protein sequence, it mutates relatively quickly, meaning you'll find genomic differences even between close generations of the same virus. However, they've found some COVID-19 E protein sequences that have a 100% match with ZC45./ZXC21. To put that in perspective, no other coronavirus has been observed with a 100% match to either COVID-19 or ZC45/ZXC21.

There's this other "natural" virus that supposedly matches COVID-19, but it seems like a fabrication to lead people away from ZC45/ZXC21

  1. The virus is called RaTG13. It's supposed to be a 96% match to COVID-19. The reason why they think this is bullshit is because RaTG13 is supposed to be found in horseshoe bats but third party researchers found out that the sequence as described probably can't actually infect horseshoe bats.

Ok, so COVID-19 and ZC45/ZXC21 are nearly identical. What does that prove?

  1. Given their nearly identical nature, two possibilities exist. COVID-19 naturally evolved from ZC45/ZXC21 or ZX45/ZXC21 was used as a template for COVID-19. But which possibility is it? It can't be evolution because...

  2. There's a protein in all coronaviruses known as Spike proteins. Spike proteins allow coronaviruses to "spear" the host cell and infect it.

  3. If you compare Spike proteins between COVID-19 and ZC45/ZXC21, they are very similar as expected...BUT they differ in one very significant way. There's one section that helps give COVID-19 the ability to infect humans instead of bats. This one section "coincidentally" looks a lot like the same section of the virus that caused the 2003's SARS epidemic.

  4. This one section could not have evolved naturally because if it did, you would expect to see other "evolutionary" changes around that section and throughout the whole protein. Instead what you're seeing is almost like a copy-and-paste. One part of the protein closely matches the ZC45/ZXC21 virus and the other part closely matches the SARS virus. It's like a bad photoshop where someone neglected to use the smudge and blur tool.

  5. There is another possibility this not-matching section just popped in through a natural gene swap (like trading Pokemon cards)...which does happen occasionally with viruses. But in order for that to happen, the two trading viruses need to infect the same host at the same time. This is impossible because SARS infects humans but ZC45/ZXC21 only infects bats. Pokemon cards thus cannot be swapped because the otakus aren't even in the same house.

  6. A final nail in this Spike protein coffin is that if you look at the beginning and end of the not-matching sequence, you find short sequences that happen to be "restrictions sites" that are commonly used in genetic engineering. (A restriction site is a genomic sequence that is easily cut through and pasted into using genetic engineering techniques.) While it's possible that these sites could just randomly be there, it's more than extremely unlikely and very suspicious.

  7. One last thing about the COVID-19 Spike protein is that there's a thing in it called a "furin-cleavage site". It's a little complicated, but basically, furin-cleavage sites don't exist in the particular line of coronaviruses that COVID-19 is associated with, and the ones that do exist are about 60% different from the furin-cleavage site in COVID-19's Spike protein. Basically, it's like COVID-19's furin-cleavage site came out of nowhere.

Take home message: ZC45/ZXC21 appears to be the template that COVID-19 was based on. One particular sequence in COVID-19 appears to be copy-and-pasted from the 2003 SARS virus. It's nearly statistically impossible and equally illogical that COVID-19 could just randomly evolve a genome that happens to look like a patchwork copy of other viruses.

  1. I won't get into it, but the rest of the paper is pretty cool. They actually delineate a possible workflow through which you could derive COVID-19 from ZC45/ZXC21. At that point, it's like rubbing it in everyone's faces that this is exactly what happened and they're going to show how they did it.

Well, this was pretty long. Hope I was able to simplify it enough.

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