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henjin's avatar

WA1 is classified under lineage A, but the two defining mutations of lineage A are C8782T and T28144C and WA1 has the third mutation C18060T. Lineage B is identical to the Wuhan-Hu-1 reference genome, but WA1 has three mutations from Wuhan-Hu-1 and lineage A has two mutations. The three mutations of WA1 are ancestral in the sense that they are shared with other sarbecoviruses like BANAL-52 and RaTG13.

Almost all market samples were lineage B, apart from the environmental sample Env_0020/A20 which was taken from a glove.

WA1 is also identical with proCoV2 which Kumar et al. reconstructed as the hypothetical ancestor of known strains of SARS-CoV-2.

On GISAID there is also one sample from Guangdong which has 5 mutations from Wuhan-Hu-1, but all of them are ancestral in the sense that they are shared with RaTG13:

$ curl https://mongol-fi.github.io/f/gisaid2020.tsv.xz|xz -dc>gisaid2020.tsv;grep RaTG13 gisaid2020.tsv|cut -f12|tr , \\n|awk -F\\t 'NR==FNR{a[$0];next}$11<10{split($12,b,",");n=0;for(i in b)n+=b[i]in a?1:-1;print n FS$0}' - early.comb|awk '$1>=3'|sort -rn|cut -f1-8,12-13|tr \\t \||head -n1

5|EPI_ISL_413892|hCoV-19/Guangdong/FS-S30-P0052/2020|2020-03-09|2020-02-28|A|China|Guangdong|5|C8782T,C18060T,C21711T,C24382T,T28144C

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Pete Lincoln's avatar

So I just had a chance to listen to your podcast on Straight Talk. Well done.

I am trying to come across to your way of thinking in that Baric was a good guy and this was all an accident.

We agree on the Made in USA and released in Wuhan, but what stops me is that Ralph accidentally sent out a bat vaccine virus to WIV designed to immunize bats, presumably after running it past Linfa in Singapore, and not knowing his brilliantly engineered virus does not infect the target bats so is useless as a Vaccine, but it is superbly adopted to humans and is very transmissible (a perfect human vaccine), yet this is only found out by a lab accident in Wuhan.

Also, you certainly are correct that this was not much of a weapon in a militarized sense (designed to kill/incapacitate), but have you considered how perfect it was for Bioterrorism ?

Ralph-2006

“If notoriety, fear and directing foreign government policies are principle objectives, then the release and subsequent discovery of a synthetically derived virus bioweapon garner tremendous media coverage, inspire fear and terrorize human populations and direct severe pressure on government officials to respond in predicted ways.”

https://www.jcvi.org/sites/default/files/assets/projects/synthetic-genomics-options-for-governance/Baric-Synthetic-Viral-Genomics.pdf

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