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Some background: The early sequences we ahve from Wuhan appear to be more distant from the putative bat ancestor of SARS-2, than virus sequences from outside Wuhan. Hypothesis: This is because early virus samples taken in proximity to Wuhan Institute of Virology were deleted.pic.twitter.com/XrjNf2i0iY
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oh look. the mysteriously deleted sequences are also phylogenetically closer to the putative bat ancestor than the Seafood Market sequences.pic.twitter.com/qbvbwTebW9
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relative distance to RaTG13, the closest relative of SARS-2. You see the seafood market sequences are all late; the deleted Wuhan sequences are earlier. The Guangdong patient infected before Jan 5 among the earliest of all.pic.twitter.com/EtUUcRtoYk
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SARS-2 got away from Chinese authorities with the outbreak at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan. This was the event that attracted international attention. The seafood market viruses were inevitably sequenced, while other, earlier virus samples from Wuhan were suppressed.
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This created the obvious problem, that virus sequences from outside Wuhan (not only from elsewhere in China, but elsewhere in the world) seemed to be phylogenetically prior to the Wuhan viruses. Because only the seafood market samples were known, and that was a late outbreak.
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Early SARS-2 sequences were deleted to obscure the origins of the virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.pic.twitter.com/pTYbTcTRps
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Now, some caveats. This is a really reader-friendly paper, with extensive, accessible discussion of the origins problem. And it's already been written up in the New York Times. I don't know, feels a little weird.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/science/coronavirus-sequences.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage …
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