Antivaxxers really need to get their #coronavirus conspiracy theories straight. Yesterday, they were blaming the flu vaccine for reducing viral interference and allowing 2019-nCoV to run wild in China. 1/https://respectfulinsolence.com/2020/01/30/coronavirus-flu-vaccine/ …
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Today, an antivaxxer is claiming that 2019-nCoV came from a strain being used to develop a vaccine against
#coronavirus that somehow got loose. I wonder what@StevenSalzberg1 thinks of this one?
2/ https://jameslyonsweiler.com/2020/01/30/on-the-origins-of-the-2019-ncov-virus-wuhan-china/ …3 replies 2 retweets 12 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @gorskon
He has quite a bit of technical detail (phylogenies and sequence alignments) in that blog post, but ultimately his argument is very weak and rather implausible. Seems more like a conspiracy theory. Far more plausible is that it's a natural virus that jumped from animals to humans
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Replying to @StevenSalzberg1
Personally, I like how he implies that the "insert" comes from a Chinese pShuttle containing the SARS S protein sequence, when in fact he's lined up sequences from the commercial pShuttle vector with no insert. It's odd that there's 68% identity, but it's not coding sequence.
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Replying to @gorskon
I looked at that alignment - the two aligned sequences are distantly related, but this would argue against his claim. If the insert came from a commercial vector, it would be near-identical. He doesn't seem to know what he's talking about, but he knows just enough to fake it
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Oddly enough, this guy used to run a bioinformatics core at a major university. I kid you not.
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Replying to @gorskon @StevenSalzberg1
Now I know why he isn't directing a bioinformatics core any more.
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