Scientist: Deleted data suggests early viral samples in Wuhan differed from samples linked to animal market HotAir

Bloom went looking for genome sequences from early samples of the virus in Wuhan. He dug through the NIH database and found something only to discover the data curiously missing when he tried to download it. That s not necessarily NIH s fault, he made clear in a Twitter thread last night. Sometimes the people who provided the data will email the agency and request deletion for whatever reason. Undaunted, Bloom went looking online to see if he could recover the missing data in an archive somewhere. And he did, finding data for 34 samples from Google Cloud that allowed him to partially reconstruct the genomes of the virus from those samples.

And when he did, what he found surprised him. Normally, says Bloom, we d expect the earliest samples of SARS-CoV-2 to most closely resemble whichever bat virus it originated from. As the virus spreads among the human population it ll inevitably mutate little by little, making it less like the progenitor virus that infected patient zero. If the virus really did come from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan then we should expect that samples taken from the market to be the most bat-like and then, as people became infected around town, the samples taken from them to look progressively less bat-like.

That s not what the samples show, says Bloom.

via hotair.com

o dear o dear